Wake by Lisa McMann (CBR-III #31)

Cannonball Read III: Book #31/52
Published: 2008
Pages: 224 (13,609 total pages so far)
Genre: YA/Supernatural

Janie can see other people's dreams. That's pretty much the plot. If she's in the same room as someone dreaming, she kind of blacks out and enters enter their dream. This makes sleepovers kind of hard.

I wasn't a huge fan of this book. The premise sounded promising, but ultimately it let me down. It just wasn't interesting enough. Most of the book was the same thing: Someone falls asleep, Janie sees their dream, blah, blah, repeat.

They did throw in a love interest, which wasn't actually that nauseating for a YA novel. It was a little over dramatic (pretty accurate for most teens though), but luckily the most annoying thing about Cabel was his name.

**SPOILER**

The ending was eye-roll inducing too. Cabel is actually working undercover with the cops and they want Janie to use her dream watching skills to help them apprehend criminals. I have a HUGE problem with this.

First of all, who the heck dreams real life past events? I sure don't. Even if someone does, how can you use that as police evidence? How do they know what is fact and what is simply your brain making up stuff?

**END SPOILER**

The dreams really annoyed me. Apparently, everyone dreams every time they fall asleep. Personally, I dream a LOT, but not every time I sleep. Also, I know you have to enter into REM sleep to dream, which takes a little while. These kids are falling asleep in class and within seconds are dreaming. I was practically a professional at sleeping through high school, and I rarely dreamed there because you only get 15 minutes or so of sleep at a time and it's not a deep sleep.

Like I mentioned in the spoiler paragraph (this itself isn't a spoiler), they all also dream real life past events. EVERY TIME. I don't think I've ever dreamed real events that happened, unless they were drastically changed to be all weird and dream-like.

For instance, once I was mad at this guy so I dreamed that he turned into a baby tiger and I stomped on him. Yeah, no one dreams like that in this book. It's all straight-up, factual history dreams.

Also, the book was very choppy with almost all simple sentences or sentence fragments. I don't think I'm going to bother with the other books in this series.

Cryer's Cross by Lisa McMann (CBR-III #21)

Cannonball Read III: Book #21/52
Published: 2011
Pages: 240 (9,791 total so far)
Genre: Young Adult

This is one of those YA books that doesn't really translate to an adult audience as well as say, The Hunger Games. I think I would have liked it a bit better if I read it when I was 15 instead at 25. On the up side, it was a really quick read - I finished it in about an hour and a half.

Our main character, Kendall, lives in the tiny town of Cryer's Cross, Montana. When two of her classmates (out of 24 students in the entire high school) mysteriously disappear, everyone in town becomes suspicious. One of the missing students happened to be Kendall's best friend/sort-of boyfriend. Then there's this new guy and his sister that showed up right before the disappearances...blah blah. Kendall sort-of falls for the new guy, but still misses her other "boyfriend", and it turns into a typical YA romance novel.

I would say the book is 90% about Kendall's love life and her OCD (forgot to mention that I guess...but don't worry, they won't let you forget if you read the book). The other 10% is the "mystery" aspect that the cover wants to you believe is the focus. Basically, it's a YA romance with a haunted desk thrown in for good measure.