Lucid

I expected Lucid to be kind of a mind-bender. What I didn’t expect was for it to be very literary: Lucid is high-quality realistic fiction hiding under a paranormal cover. I was so pleasantly surprised that I gushed about Lucid to my roommates. Lucid could easily be read by an older audience because of the sophisticated writing style and the way in which it examines human relationships. The relationships in Lucid aren’t the kind you find in YA very often, which makes the book all the more amazing. ( )

This novel presents a very unique reading experience, as it felt like what it was supposed to be - a dream. Not just in the way of being a fictional story, but in a hazy way that is difficult to explain. The narration suspends the reader in some odd dimension because the characters themselves are present in different levels of reality (or of fiction?). Each night one of the girls goes to sleep, she dreams of the day that the other had. One is real, one is a dream - but which one is truly dreaming?

The whole idea behind this story is very confusing and filled with distortion, but in a very intriguing way. I hypothesized that reading the story I would be sure who is real and who is fictional, however, once I made up my mind on who is real, I ended up being wrong. The authors are very good at making sure that one girl does not seem extremely real or extremely fake, but that it could really go either way.

My favorite part of the novel is that about halfway through things start to get really trippy. For a good half on the novel, the switching POV's seem to be just switching stories, nothing much to it. However, eventually the stories start to overlap as the characters loose sense of reality, mixing their "real" lives with their "dream" lives. I was honestly creeped out at times, and one scene in particular still makes me cringe just thinking of it. It reminded me a lot of "Shutter Island", in that strange overlap of fiction and reality, with the possibility of the presented reality being made up.

Overall, if you are looking for a creepy book to mess with your mind, Lucid is a good match for you. It is strangely beautifully disturbing. However, be aware that I would not consider this novel a "quick read" at all. Not because it is painful to get through, but because I found myself reading slower to match the dream-like feel of the narration. ( )

4.5/5 stars.

Oh wow. So. This book reminded me a ton of "Inception" - the lucid dreaming (for which the book is named), the question if one is awake or asleep, the worldbuilding, all of it. Christopher Nolan would be proud. I myself have often wondered when asleep - am I really dreaming someone else's day? Adrienne Stoltz and Ron Bass have put together a wonderful book answering just that question.

This one's a little hard to review, because it's both character and plot driven. To find a book like this is rare, balancing the two pretty evenly up until the end, and to talk about it is difficult, to say the least. Both Maggie and Sloane are convinced that they've been dreaming the other's daily exploits everyday for their entire lives, so they both get equal screentime talking about their day, until things start getting out of hand, and the question of sanity comes heavily into play. That was really refreshing - both having equal screentime instead of one over the other, and both worlds were built really well, with very realistic characters. It's an extremely well-balanced book in general, up until the end, and that was just really refreshing to read.

The other technical areas are more or less flawless, too, so I'll talk more about other areas and things I just loved about this book in this review.

All of that being said, while the plot is very clean-cut, the ending really isn't, and I love how the authors had the courage to leave it so open-ended as to let the reader really decide their own ending. Was it all real? Was it all a dream? Was it both? This is one of the best standalones I've read in a long time precisely because of this open-ended question that we get from the authors. Because of how vivid the writing was for both girls, it made me wonder if one or both of the authors had experience with lucid dreaming themselves. I do - as a result of me having sleepwalking nightmares as a kid, I was taught lucid dreaming as a technique to control them and stay in bed by a shrink. Even now, almost twenty years later from my first round of lessons on the subject, I'm still able to lucidly dream and recall my dreams very easily. There's really something to be said for lucid dreaming as you can build worlds upon worlds in your head and dream them and yet know they're probably not real - keyword here being probably. And that's where the authors of this book really focus on things in the plot - is any of these two girls' "dreamed lives" real at all?

There's also the question of if this book is even paranormal at all, if there are paranormal or supernatural doings within this book - and the authors cleverly don't really answer that until the end - and when we do get an answer, it's as I said before, very open-ended and leaves the reader to decide. The quality of writing is intensely cinematic, so when I found out the writers are both long-time screenwriters, it really wasn't a surprise. Both the lives of Maggie and Sloane are so vividly wrought that you can feel the tension on both sides, feel how the feel, their joy, their fear, and as things start to go to hell, their absolute terror at the idea of losing one another. I have had dreams like that, and it just definitely stuck in me long after I'd finished the book. Having to say goodbye to someone who may or may not be real is just as scary regardless if they're real or not, because your heart is still with them. And the authors really did a wonderful job portraying that.

That being said, this is not an easy book to read. It's very twisty and bendy and it will force you to open your mind to the possibility that's very Schrodinger's Cat-esque - the fact that they both might be living and not living at the same time, dreaming and not dreaming at the same time, and so forth. Movies like "Black Swan", "Memento", "The Warrior and the Princess", and "Inception" are all built around questions like this - what is real? what is fantasy? - and they're all some of my favorite movies. I found myself surprisingly bonded to both characters by the end of the book, and there are parts so moving that they shook me to the core (but I won't reveal what those parts are - I'll just say they're mostly toward the end of the book), and reminded me of my own lucid dreaming experiences where I had to choose between dreams, reality, sanity, and love.

The best part? No insta-love. No love triangles. All of the romances here are authentic, and you do have the characters (specifically Maggie) taking stock of what is desire/lust versus what is real love (and her motivations for both) - which was really, really a huge breath of fresh air within YA.

Final verdict? Definitely one of the best in YA contemporary fiction, hands down, this year and definitely one of the most balliest concepts to deploy within a YA contemporary tale within the last few years. This book is incredible, but it may not be everyone's cup of tea because it will give you a LOT to think about. "Lucid" is out now from Razorbill/Penguin in North America, so be sure to check it out. You really can't afford to miss this debut.

(posted to librarything, goodreads, shelfari, and birthofanewwitch.wordpress.com) ( )