Lucy’s normal life is turned upside down when she
casually meets Benjamin – a seemingly young man with an ancient secret who
haunts her dreams with mystery and secrets she desperately wants to understand.
The new hot guy walking her dreams isn’t the only mystery
in Lucy’s life – as her touch seems to be bringing life back to the dead, once
or twice could have been odd misunderstandings but it’s becoming clear
something supernatural is happening
She needs an explanation – but for that she needs her
dreams of Benjamin to be real.
The plot is, sadly, held together with spit and wishful
thinking. There’s a moment when Lucy goes to the beach to see Benjamin posing
dramatically before the stormy waves. There’s no real explanation why Benjamin has
decided to wander down the beach in the middle of a storm. As for Lucy driving
around dangerous roads in the middle of the night?
“Her mind was
defying all logic by insisting for some inexplicable cosmic reason that she had
to go back and find him.”
Yes, really. And this is hardly the only time it happens.
People do outright bizarre things because of random feelings that crop out of
nowhere and, later in the book, because the Light (whatever that is – magic,
god, a bit of both) wills it. This story is held together by a lot of these
moments
Sometimes it’s not even explained that well. One of the main problems of this book is that it’s pacing is awful. The whole first half to two third of this book drags out terribly as Lucy is wilfully kept in the dark about her special powers, the whole plots history and everything else woo-woo. We get a huge amount of Lucy angst and worry and fretting and aborted love triangle and little of anything remotely interesting. Most of the book, Benjamin refuses to tell Lucy anything except in dreams where he has the option of plausible deniability; if she tries to talk about it in real life he pretends not to understand her. So she spends a huge amount of this book wailing and angsting about whether her dreams are really real or she just falls asleep and has a vivid imagination and all the creatures coming back to life around her are pure coincidence. Unsurprisingly her dreams are real. But why Benjamin decided to play this ridiculous secret game is never really explained – all it seems to do is be there to drag the story out for much much longer
Is this is a spoiler? No. Because any reader who is even
a teeny tiny bit genre savvy is fully aware that her dreams are real.
I honestly can’t even say that the concept is original or
draws me in. We have a pretty standard tale of a high school girl who has
special woo-woo powers because REASONS and she’s under attack by bad guys
because REASONS so she has to come to terms with her powers and the history and
everything while she is repeatedly told how so very special she is.
Sadly, it’s also a classic kind of specialness because
has no real special qualities beyond her woo-woo, which is so very special. She
learns super fighty skills because woo-woo. She has powers because chosen one
woo-woo. There is nothing really about her that stands out as special – and I
can get the whole “every day person” sense of wanting to identify with the protagonist
– but I’d then expect that every day person protagonist to stop up and be
special not just be the bearer of the special.
