Product Description

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 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....

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6530 in Books
• Published on: 2008-12-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781416974475
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
Lisa McMann is also the author of Wake. She lives with her family in the Phoenix area. Read more about Lisa at http://lisamcmann.com or be her friend at http://www.myspace.com/lisamcmann.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
December 9, 2005, 12:55 p.m.

Janie Hannagan's math book slips from her fingers. She grips the edge of the table in the school library. Everything goes black and silent. She sighs and rests her head on the table. Tries to pull herself out of it, but fails miserably. She's too tired today. Too hungry. She really doesn't have time for this.

And then.

She's sitting in the bleachers in the football stadium, blinking under the lights, silent among the roars of the crowd.

She glances at the people sitting in the bleachers around her -- fellow classmates, parents -- trying to spot the dreamer. She can tell this dreamer is afraid, but where is he? Then she looks to the football field. Finds him. Rolls her eyes.

It's Luke Drake. No question about it. He is, after all, the only naked player on the field for the homecoming game.

Nobody seems to notice or care. Except him. The ball is snapped and the lines collide, but Luke is covering himself with his hands, hopping from one foot to the other. She can feel his panic increasing. Janie's fingers tingle and go numb.

Luke looks over at Janie, eyes pleading, as the football moves toward him, a bullet in slow motion. "Help," he says.

She thinks about helping him. Wonders what it would take to change the course of Luke's dream. She even considers that a boost of confidence to the star receiver the day before the big game could put Fieldridge High in the running for the Regional Class A Championship.

But Luke's really a jerk. He won't appreciate it. So she resigns herself to watching the debacle. She wonders if he'll choose pride or glory.

He's not as big as he thinks he is.

That's for damn sure.

The football nearly reaches Luke when the dream starts over again. Oh, get ON with it already, Janie thinks. She concentrates in her seat on the bleachers and slowly manages to stand. She tries to walk back under the bleachers for the rest of the dream so she doesn't have to watch, and surprisingly, this time, she is able.

That's a bonus.

1:01 p.m.

Janie's mind catapults back inside her body, still sitting at her usual remote corner table in the library. She flexes her fingers painfully, lifts her head and, when her sight returns, she scours the library.

She spies the culprit at a table about fifteen feet away. He's awake now. Rubbing his eyes and grinning sheepishly at the two other football players who stand around him, laughing. Shoving him. Whapping him on the head.

Janie shakes her head to clear it and she lifts up her math book, which sits open and facedown on the table where she dropped it. Under it, she finds a fun-size Snickers bar. She smiles to herself and peers to the left, between rows of bookshelves.

But no one is there for her to thank.

Evening, December 23, 1996

Janie Hannagan is eight. She wears a thin, faded red-print dress with too-short sleeves, off-white tights that sag between her thighs, gray moon boots, and a brown, nappy coat with two missing buttons. Her long, dirty-blond hair stands up with static. She rides on an Amtrak train with her mother from their home in Fieldridge, Michigan, to Chicago to visit her grandmother. Mother reads the Globe across from her. There is a picture on the cover of an enormous man wearing a powder-blue tuxedo. Janie rests her head against the window, watching her breath make a cloud on it.

The cloud blurs Janie's vision so slowly that she doesn't realize what is happening. She floats in the fog for a moment, and then she is in a large room, sitting at a conference table with five men and three women. At the front of the room is a tall, balding man with a briefcase. He stands in his underwear, giving a presentation, and he is flustered. He tries to speak but he can't get his mouth around the words. The other adults are all wearing crisp suits. They laugh and point at the bald man in his underwear.

The bald man looks at Janie.

And then he looks at the people who are laughing at him.

His face crumples in defeat.

He holds his briefcase in front of his privates, and that makes the others laugh harder. He runs to the door of the conference room, but the handle is slippery -- something slimy drips from it. He can't get it open; it squeaks and rattles loudly in his hand, and the people at the table double over. The man's underwear is grayish-white, sagging. He turns to Janie again, with a look of panic and pleading.

Janie doesn't know what to do.

She freezes.

The train's brakes whine.

And the scene grows cloudy and is lost in fog.

"Janie!" Janie's mother is leaning toward Janie. Her breath smells like gin, and her straggly hair falls over one eye. "Janie, I said, maybe Grandma will take you to that big fancy doll store. I thought you would be excited about that, but I guess not." Janie's mother sips from a flask in her ratty old purse.

Janie focuses on her mother and smiles. "That sounds fun," she says, even though she doesn't like dolls. She would rather have new tights. She wriggles on the seat, trying to adjust them. The crotch stretches tight at mid-thigh. She thinks about the bald man and scrunches her eyes. Weird.

When the train stops, they take their bags and step into the aisle. In front of Janie's mother, a disheveled, bald businessman emerges from his compartment.

He wipes his face with a handkerchief.

Janie stares at him.

Her jaw drops. "Whoa," she whispers.

The man gives her a bland look when he sees her staring, and turns to exit the train.

Copyright © 2008 by Lisa McMann

Customer Reviews

Courtesy of Teens Read Too
Dreams can usually be categorized as our source of entertainment while we are sleeping. Although we sometimes may not remember them, they often take us on a journey that we may (or may not) want to happen. For Janie Hannagan, though, dreams are her worst nightmares.

Not like any other normal teenage girl, Janie witnesses the dreams that anyone within close proximity is dreaming. Of course, she doesn't really want this to happen, but it has been going on ever since she was eight. Janie is able to see the ordinary dreams, from falling to drowning to going to work without wearing any pants. Along with that, she is able to see people's secrets and what they desire the most.

There is nothing Janie can do about this but to just keep the knowledge to herself. That all changes when Cable, the guy who everyone thought was a pothead and a dealer, enters her life as she enters his dreams. Half the time, the dreams are somewhat sweet and romantic, but then other times she witnesses the nightmares that have been haunting him.

As Janie tries to sort out not only his dreams but her own feelings for Cable, she learns that the only way to survive her reactions towards other people's dreams is to control them -- and to help the people complete the tasks that they so desperately want to accomplish.

Every now and then a novel gets published and becomes a work of art that we all will long remember. WAKE is one of those novels that is not only unique but also mesmerizing and exhilarating. With her debut novel, Lisa McMann creates something that will be on our minds and change the way we think about what we read.

Reviewed by: Randstostipher "tallnlankyrn" Nguyen

An Unexpected Dream
I don't really know what I was expecting from this book, but what I found was pretty amazing. The plot flowed like a dream in that it was told in minimalistic spurts that echoed a dream state. And the story itself wasn't quiet mystery or fantasy or romance, but seemed to combine all three in an entirely new genera.

Janie Hannagan is a dream catcher. She wakes into other people's nightmares and fantasies, yet she doesn't know what they expect her to do. From her best friend begging her to help save her drowning brother to the lonely old woman in the nursing home where she works asking for a second chance with a lover she lost in the war, Janie doesn't know if she can help any of these people turn their fears into happiness.

That is until she falls into burnout Cabel Strumheller's dream and finds out there are some secrets in Cabel's past and some hope for his future that she's not sure are nightmares or fantasies--and she doesn't know if she wants to find the truth either way. But Cabel's dreams aren't the only thing she finds herself falling into. With his protective instinct and deep brown eyes, Janie might just be falling in love.

I did find the exposition a little lacking in places so Janie's emotional extremes baffled me at times. And I don't want to give away the ending to explain what I thought about Cabel, but just know this is a definite series set up.

This book was a fast read with some great parts. It was a little reminiscent of Meg Cabot's 1-800-WHERE-R-YOU series, only with more substance. It was edgy like a Holly Black book and engaging like Janet Evanovich's Stehpanie Plum series, yet it was totally unique. I'm looking forward to FADE, and can't wait to see what comes after that.

Didn't Reach Its Potential
Janie Hannagan has a gift -- or rather a curse -- for being sucked into other people's dreams whenever they're sleeping nearby. She is witness to funny things; strange things; typical, boring things; and, in one instance, something so disturbing she won't even drive on Waverly Road any more. With the help of resident hottie Cabel Strumheller, Janie must discover whose terrifying dream she beheld, and what is wrong with her that she was able to see it in the first place.

When I started this book, I didn't like it. Then it got better, at which point I was quite into it, then it got worse again, and it didn't recover. The mystery McMann introduces is enough to keep a reader up at night for more than one reason, but it peters off shortly after its establishment and is ultimately unfulfilling. In addition, it seems people fall asleep a lot more often in this story than they do in real life, presumably a tactic to keep Janie's special ability at the forefront of readers' minds.

Though possessing an intriguing premise, there is one semi-major flaw that for me made the entire foundation of the story unsound. Dreams are people's subconscious ramblings, not their conscious thoughts. Most of the dreams upon which Janie intrudes bear significant consequence to the plot, but in my experience the majority of real-life dreams mean very little.

On a more positive note, the writing style is fast-paced and unique, adding a distinguished and enticing flare to the novel.

I would say that Lisa McMann's debut into young adult fiction didn't quite reach its potential, but the idea behind it is promising enough for me to have high hopes for its sequel, Fade.