She can't tell anybody about what she does they'd never believe her, or worse, they'd think she's a freak. So Janie lives on the fringe, cursed with an ability she doesn't want and can’t control.
Then she falls into a gruesome nightmare, one that chills her to the bone. For the first time, Janie is more than a witness to someone else's twisted psyche. She is a participant.
Rating: 2/5 Stars
”This is not the right way to fix it, she decides. But what is the right way?
Because it’s time.
Time to stop crying, time to get her act together and do something. Time to move beyond the pity party.”
Trust me when I say, this is NOT Janie’s motherfucking time.
This is a weird book, there’s no denying it. In many ways it can be reminiscent of Shatter Me; the sometimes awkward writing style (albeit Mafi’s could actually be beautiful while this one is just clunky), the self-pitying main character, the lack of a plot (again, Shatter Me at least had the whole revolution while this is just a girl complaining and descriptions of very simple dreams), and the special snowflake-ness.
The premise of Wake is actually pretty interesting. Janie doesn’t have dreams of her own, instead ever since she was eight years old she discovered she is sucked into other people’s dreams against her will. She can still feel herself in the real world, move and think, but she is blind to reality while she is unable to escape out of someone else’s dream world. This brings her a whole lot of problems for her, considering how she sometimes is impaired to walk, drive and basically do anything that could put her at risk when someone nearby is dreaming.
I’m conflicted about this book because it had some really cool stuff, not just the dream presence but you also had representation of teenagers having sex (both responsibly and not) and it was assumed as something normal other than shameful or terrible, like we see in so many other young adult stories. There was also a gay character!... but she was kind of a bitch, although to be fair pretty much all girls were assholes so… yeay? *throws confused and pissed off confetti*
Like I said, it has some cool stuff but the story suffers from a lack of plot, dumb characters and emotionless writing. This book had some serious heavy issues, yet the way it dealt with them was so bland and senseless you just couldn’t connect with it.
”Janie’s mother simply doesn’t care about anything that has to do with Janie. She has never really cared.
And that’s fucking sad.”
I wasn’t a fan of Janie, the main character. She’s had this problem ever since she was eight and she never done anything about besides cry, not even google about it! It was so dumb, all she ever did was complain but never take any precaution, hell the doctor tells her not to drive because of her “seizures” and first thing she does when she leaves the consult is buy a car, because she’s just that fricking dumb.
It was more annoying when you consider how easy it was for her to take control of her dream situation (albeit by the end of the book, not entirely so). All she had to do was read a few books on dreams, say out loud “I want to have a dream to tell me how to fix this problem” and in one night BOOM! Problema solved.
The romance was… really weird. There’s this guy, Caleb, who Janie only talked to once, yet two years after that first conversation the guy starts flirting with her out of nowhere and having dreams where he kisses her. It was even weirder because he once fell asleep beside her and he somehow saw her in the dream, then he woke up all pissed at her yelling “What the fuck is wrong with you?” even though… it made no sense. Somehow because he saw her in the dream, Janie felt bad and confessed her problem to him, A COMPLETE STRANGER. Because the guy just started yelling at her, she somehow knew he knew she had (accidentally) invaded his privacy, even though we never knew what… ugh, forget it it’ll never make sense.
The guy gets a little freaked out that she had been inside her head because, let’s face it, nobody would want that. And what does Janie do? The second she hears a rumor that the guy she’s talked to three times might be selling drugs and sleeping with some girl, she goes to his house in the middle of the night hoping to catch him while dreaming so she can get inside his head LIKE A TOTAL CREEP.
”She can hear his bed creak when he lies down, and she can hear him punch his pillow, getting settled for sleep.
She wonders what he wears to bed. She is more than temped to look.
But she will wait.
She must wait.
She waits.”
Seriously, what was wrong with her?
Overall, and even though it had its many, many flaws, Wake was still a somewhat entertaining read and very short in case people want to try it out.
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