People often look their most peaceful when asleep.  Whatever the dream that is going on within them, outwardly peace and contentment often reign.  What, though, if you could see what they were dreaming?  What if you experienced the dreams, nightmares, and kaleidoscopes of desires and fears along with the dreamer? And what if there was no way you could stop or control it?

These are the sort of questions that Lisa McMann’s Wake asks.  Seventeen-year-old Janie has spent most of her life being unwillingly subject to others’ dreams, forced to experience them along with the dreamer. And, although, Janie has slowly learned to put enough distance between herself and others that she can sleep at home, school is a minefield of napping teenagers, falling nightmares, and the ever popular naked-in-front-of-the-entire-school dream. Even school field-trips are a danger, for what bus is ever without at least one sleeping student?

Although a nuisance, and often vaguely unsettling, Janie has not felt in real danger until driving by a dark house on a quiet street, and there:

she is in a strange house. In a dirty kitchen. A huge, young monster-man with knives for fingers approaches…He pulls a vinyl-seated chair across the kitchen floor, picks it up, and whirls it around above his head…But there is no one else. No one else but the monster-man with finger-knives, and Janie…

This dream terrifies her – both for the rage the dreamer must feel and the sense of pain Janie gets from the dream. In self-defense, she avoids the street entirely, but her dreams are still disturbed, and Janie still feels alone. Her dreams, the the dreams of others, are not the only struggles Janie faces, her waking life is difficult as well.  With an alcoholic, uninterested mother, Janie struggles alone until sixth grade, when Carrie moves next door and becomes her best friend.

Janie and Carrie grown up, and high school, part-time jobs, and boys arrive. Life only gets a little better as she gets older, and we watch Janie grow up to be a self-reliant young woman, but with some issues she can neither speak of nor come to terms with.  She struggles daily with her mother’s drinking, and with her own struggle to make it through school and earn enough to escape to university.  Carrie, Janie’s one supporter, has found a boyfriend of her own, and Janie becomes even more isolated and self-reliant.  Soon, of course, she meets a boy, but he has secrets of his own, and may break her heart. This is certainly young adult fiction, but the issues that Janie confronts are important no matter what the age.

McMann does an excellent job of making Wake as much about healing from nightmares as the nightmares themselves.  Janie’s talent is fascinating, and it is dealt with in such a matter of fact way, and with enough repercussions, that the  reader is drawn in to the story.  This book is a quick read, and ends on a hopeful note, but there is enough exploring to do within Janie’s talent, and enough growing to do as she gets older, that the sequels sound promising as well.

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