Wake by Lisa McMann

Wake
Author: Lisa McMann
Published by Simon Pulse
Dream Catcher #1
Pages: 210
My Rating: 1/5 stars

Summary: (From Goodreads)
 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 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 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....

My Review:
Look. I know a lot of people loved this book, and if you did, great! Please don't let my review dampen your spirits, and I promise to be respectful in this review. If you liked this book, don't read this if you don't want to. I do not, at all, want to spoil a memory of a great book for you. But I seriously disliked this novel. Wake was a huge dissapointment for me, and there is no way I am going to pick up the second or third book.

 I had four problems with this novel that led to my one star rating. I don't rate books one star often....in fact, the majority of the books I read I enjoy, so I have to have good reasons to dislike a book.

With Wake, my first problem was the narration. I know lots of people have said that this is one of the things that they loved most about the book, and if they loved it, it worked well for them, I will repeat myself.....great! But, sadly, it did not work for me. I found it very choppy and boring, and I know that if Wake was not written in this way I could have enjoyed it more. I felt no emotion coming from the characters, and I found I coudln't get a good idea of their thoughts, or I couldn't get close to them, to imagine and actually know what their world was like.

 I originally also had high hopes for this novel. It sounded awesome....with Janie's ability to see dreams of others, but it sadly was not carried out well. I felt as if her ability, what seemed like the center idea of Wake, was really not developed, and nothing seemed to happen.

 Then there was the bit of extra plot that came out of nowhere. I just thought, with the mysterey and the secret agents, what the heck is with this? It did not work for me, and seemed to be randomly thrown in there....to get things more exciting. All it did was frustrate me.

 The last issue I had was the swearing. Now, I do not at all have an issue with swearing in books. It doesn't bother me. But the ammount of swearing in Wake just infuriated me, and had me rolling my eyes. It seemed, at times, that the author was just experimenting different ways to say certain words. It seemed as if half of Janie's vocabulary consisted around swear words. Now that I think back, it might have been a way to display emotion...I guess it didn't come across the right way for me.

 Wake was not a book I enjoyed, as you can probably tell. I did read the whole thing, but I mostly wanted to get it over with. I do hope this series will get better, but I have given up attempting to read the next one. They just don't appeal to me anymore. But no disrespect to the author at all. In fact, I have read a bit of her other book, Cryer's Cross, and I enjoyed it. I hope to pick it up and finish it soon. Wake just wasn't one of those novels that worked for me.