Wake by Lisa McMann

"Not all dreams are sweet.

For seventeen-year-old Janie, getting sucked into other people's dreams is getting old. Especially the falling dreams, the naked-but-nobody-notices dreams, and the sex-crazed dreams. Janie's seen enough fantasy booty to last her a lifetime.

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 shills her tot he bone. For the first time, Janie is more than a witness to someone else's twisted psyche. She is a participant..."

This is another book I've had sat on my shelf for a while before actually reading. And oh freaking hell I wish I'd read it sooner!! It was very easy to get sucked in to Janie's world. The way she falls in to dreams and really wishes she was simply normal. It's easy to understand her fear of others sleeping, she gets pulled in to their dreams even if she's awake, and she's certainly never wanted to be in them.

It starts off showing a little of how Janie's day-to-day battle with others dreams goes, and has a few little flashbacks to when she first started getting sucked in to dreams and what it was like for her. Then Janie ends up in a dream far more violent and twisted than she's ever ended up in. After that, things change drastically again.

I couldn't put this book down and finished it within a few hours. The way it's written just sucks you in and hangs on tight, I had to find out what happened. What the dark, twisted dream was really about, and how things were going to work out. Sometimes the reality had an almost dream like quality to it as well, slipping from one to the other almost seamlessly. Janie has always been an outcast thanks to finding herself in others dreams and despite having a best friend who she spends a fair amount of time with, she is mostly alone. Her mom is a drunk who spends most of her time passed out and her dad is long gone. Janie changes and grows a lot through the book, and I always love being able to see the changes in a person over the course of a single book. Janie is pretty easy to like and oddly easy to relate to as well. She's got a lot of depth to her, though it takes a little while to really show. Some of the side characters are a little flat, but it's easy to ignore that with the focus elsewhere. I can't really explain whats so compelling about this book. I just couldn't put it down. Janie, her problems, the dreams and the guy involved just got to me and I couldn't get enough.

It's a really great read with good characters, a fast moving plot and some good twists. It's got a pretty dark tone to a lot of it and it's easy to get lost in. I wish I'd read this sooner, but at least it means I can get Fade and Gone (books 2 and 3 of the series) and read them together. Great book!!

Rating: 9/10