Lucid

by Adrienne Stoltz and Ron Bass

Grade: 2 stars
Story summary: Two girls with completely different lives, with one common factor. At night, they don't have dreams, but live the other girl's life. But one life is real, and one is just a dream.

Thoughts: I expected this to be quite a different sort of book. A dream reality and the real one, all mixed up due to mental instability or weird machines or something. Kind of like Inception, where the focus was on the dream world, and it affected all the characters development and plot lines. But this wasn't really like that. It was basically just two different girls living two different lives and falling in love a bunch, with sporadic references to their awful secret. Until right near the end. That's where it all went wonky and the dream reality was revealed for what it really was. I wanted more weirdness, darn it all! The stuff at the end was cool, but by that time, I didn't really care anymore.

Yet... I don't know if that really could be my main issue with this book, because I absolutely loved the sadly-cancelled Awake TV series (with Jason Isaacs!), and it was in a very similar format. And this book has been loved by a lot of people, and compared to Inception quite a bit. So...maybe it was solely that I wasn't terribly interested in the girls themselves, or the romantic drama that pervaded their lives. I mean, seriously, there were about fifty dozen love interests. Ok, well only four (two for each girl). But it was enough for me. I am actually quite proud of myself that I kept reading, as I have had serious issues in the past continuing books if there are really obvious, rather boring, very hot love interests.