GoodRead - "Wake" & "Fade" by Lisa McMann Book Review

Janie has a small problem. She enters other people’s dreams. She can’t stop it – whenever someone falls a sleep in a room, she gets sucked into it. She has entered every dream you can think of: the being naked in front of the class dream, the falling dreams, the sex dreams… But then she enters a dream that scares her. A dream where she’s not just the observer, but she’s actually involved in…

And that how the first book, Wake, in the Wake Trilogy by Lisa McMann starts. Janie trying to figure out how to handle her falling into dreams and then, later, how to use her entering other people’s dreams to her advance. All of this, while getting closer to Cabel who, for a reason she can’t understand, seems to care about her…

The first two books in the trilogy, Wake and Fade, have been released in the US for quite some time and they are (FINALLY) hitting the UK. Wake will be published at the end of October and Fade will be published sometime in April 2010. But, in the USA, they will already have the third book in the trilogy, Gone, as it will be released in February 2010.

I discovered this author and her books via a Twitter friend of mine (like most books of late – eyes Maureen Johnson, Maggie Stiefvater among others!) and I sped through this book, ordering them from a UK store that got US copies so no waiting, and then sped through them.

No kidding here, these books are fast reads. You can easily read these in one sitting, and at the end of each book, you feel the need to grab the next book.

Also, a great thing about these books is the fact that it’s doesn’t fit in one genre. They easily fit into several, and that’s great! If you don’t like the supernatural element to the story, then there’s the romance element or the crime element to keep you interested.

And then, you have to include the shock factor which Lisa has buckets of. She dares to use language and write scenes that most authors would shy away from. I mean, I dare you to read the last 100 pages of Fade and not be shocked!

Now, I know that there will be some people who, when reading these books, will strongly dislike the language used, the boldness of the scenes or may find the fact that she write in the Present Tense (that took some getting use to. I find it very confusing at the start of Wake!), but I do really enjoy this trilogy. I wish that the books were longer and I hunger for Gone. But, at the same time, when I start reading Gone (will is on my list of “Books I Must Get in 2010”), I know that I won’t want Gone to finish. I won’t want Gone to be… well, gone.