Wake (Dream Catcher, #1)
author: Lisa McMann
name: Paul
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2008
rating: 2
read at: 2012/03/12
date added: 2012/03/12
shelves: novel, young-adult
review:
For book recommendations, I tend to specifically look for them, finding several friends, podcasts, websites and a few other places (The Daily Show provides quite a few of my nonfiction recs) to provide a steady stream of possible nexts. Not that I need more stuff to put on my insurmountable to-read pile, but I like to have options. Which is why it’s funny to me that sometimes I’ll grab a book and start reading based on no recommendation at all, and I’m not sure what it is that makes me do this. Maybe it’s striking cover art, or an interesting synopsis on the inside flap or back cover, perhaps simply a title. In the case of Wake by Lisa McMann, there was a display copy of the third book in the series that Wake begins (Gone) which somehow caught my eye in a bookstore and made me seek out the initial volume.
Which is all to say that I came at this with zero preconceptions, having never heard of the book or the author before they caught my eye. And from that perspective, I can say that Wake was incapable of disappointing me, but I did find myself eventually disappointed. The disappointment comes from the way the book’s central premise, that a teenager named Janie gets pulled against her will into the dreams of others who are sleeping around her, is full of potential. And even, to a certain extent, that potential is realized. What was ultimately disappointing is that the quality of the writing is mediocre to bad, such that I found myself reaching for a nonexistent red pen as I tore through the brief, wide-spaced, two hundred page novel.
McMann does a couple of things very well: She writes with evocative urgency, especially in her dream descriptions, and she has a very strong sense of pacing such that the prose presses onward (it took me about three hours to read the whole thing and I’m not a particularly fast reader), yet when it is narratively important to convey the stretch of time, she usually does so without bogging down the book in unnecessary detail. But what McMann struggles with is tone. For example, for a young adult book she peppers the prose with blue language which is not necessarily out of context for a book about high school kids. Yet despite her willingness to drop vulgarity, when it comes to the hormonally-soaked activities of these largely parentless kids, she pulls way back into incongruous kissing and hand-holding rather than allow, even at a narrative distance, sex to occur. The characters talk about it a lot, but it never seems to actually happen, which makes the air of authenticity slip. Even Christopher Pike back in the 80s wasn’t timid about having his characters “go all the way” and he mostly kept the foul language out of the dialogue. Somehow that felt less phony than this does.
Also McMann’s sentence structure is weak. This is the kind of technical criticism I usually refrain from making but I swear a good thirty percent of the sentences in Wake are fragments, and unnecessary ones at that. She also struggles with analogies and her characterizations are woefully predictable, where they exist at all. Moreover, in spite of her command of pace and description, she lacks either the ability or the will to truly surprise the reader. It’s not that events are telegraphed in advance so much as every revelation falls back to the most predictable possibility. Perhaps McMann doesn’t think her audience is sophisticated enough for the truly unexpected, but I’ve read plenty of young adult novels that don’t follow every well-worn path and are far more popular (insofar as they reached my distant ears where Wake only came to me by some bookseller’s stacking whim), for whatever that’s worth.
In the end I’m sort of ambivalent about Wake. It was a light, fun read while it lasted and I really liked the central concept, but considering that Wake ends on a high note and lacks any real egregious loose ends, I’m not sure I’m all that inclined to pick up the sequels and I think that says something pretty significant about the overall strength of a first-in-a-trilogy novel.