Pros: It’s good to see what happens next, but…
Cons: Wishy-washy whiny heroine; too much back-and-forth; less focus on the things that made the world so unique; Hayden seems bland now; heroine keeps missing the obvious things
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
Review book courtesy of Penguin Group
Theia has returned to her home in Serendipity Falls, but she is no longer entirely human. The blood of a demon runs in her veins, and she finds it harder and harder to resist the hunger that hits her so hard—a hunger for human life essence. She bargained her humanity away to save Hayden, the boy she loves, but now she pushes him away, believing they can’t ever be together. Then the students at their school succumb one by one to a wasting illness, and she suspects Hayden of causing it. All of that would be bad enough, but the nightmare realm of Under keeps pulling at her through her dreams, trying to lure her and Hayden back. And it’s willing to play dirty to get them.
Gwen Hayes’s Falling Under blew me away. The imagery was fantastic. The world was delightfully unique. Unfortunately, this meant Dreaming Awake
What seemed like an understandably tempestuous and confused relationship before, now seems over the top in its back-and-forth nature. Theia should have grown at least a bit from the events of the last book, but instead she seems whiny and wishy-washy. Sure, folks do stupid things, especially in the chaos of growing up, but Dreaming Awake took this too far. She keeps ignoring the obvious, and thus comes across as obtuse and unobservant. She went from being understandably conflicted to being the sort of heroine one wants to give a good shake to in the hopes of jarring some common sense into her brain. It didn’t help that Hayden, who made a fascinating impression last time, is fairly bland through most of this book. In fact, most of the characters seemed to have lost some of their luster.
It seems to me as though Hayes sacrificed the aspects of Falling Under that made it so beautifully unique in order to create a more mainstream, ordinary paranormal YA book in Dreaming Awake. And that’s a shame, because we already have plenty of those.
I have heard mixed reviews about this book. I think I will have to at least give the first few chapters a read with the look inside before I discount it. I think it sounds intriguing. At least it has a good premise even if the heroine is a bit wishy-washy and whiny.
I really loved the first book in the series, so I wish I had better things to say about this one. It does get better toward the end, but the beginning definitely drags.