Dream Girl- Review

 For Christine, dreams have never meant much. Until she meets Gabriel. Everyone thinks Christine should stay away from her new coworker at the library—thanks to his bad reputation—but when her dreams grow more vivid and she becomes entangled in a dangerous dream world with Gabriel every night, she can’t stay away. Soon it’s clear there is far more to dreams than Christine ever imagined, and now she’s on the path to making the biggest, and strangest, decision of her life. (goodreads.com)

Let me just start by saying that I love the idea behind all of this. Gabriel has spent most of his life dream walking (against his will might I add), not only is he forced to stay in these dreams for a undetermined amount of time, but if he's hurt in them, he's hurt in real life as well. It makes the old superstition that if you die in your dreams, you die in real life, very scary. Right after she meets Gabriel, Christine begins to dream walk as well, only, she has no clue what's going on, until she meets Gabriel in a dream and he is forced to explain. Then we insert bad guys and government officials and we have a big mess on our hands.

As much as I love the idea of this story, the read was a little hard for me. I wish there had been a little more build up the the relationship between Gabriel and Christine. I feel like everything happened between them so quickly, that as it readers, it was hard to connect with them. One day they're meeting at work, the next day Gabriel is leaving stories (although it read more like poetry) in her locker, and then they're instantly connected and joined at the hip, it was just hard to get my head around. I also didn't really understand the government angle. I think it's cool that the government had this whole "dream department" that no one knows about, but what does the government want them to do, why are they important, do they go after terrorists? I assume these questions will be answered in book two, but I felt like it was worth mentioning.

I work with teenagers, I'm around them, literally, all day long, so I have a pretty good handle on teenage speech patterns, and Christine and Gabriel didn't quite make it there for me. It doesn't flow, it doesn't seem natural, kind of readers like an adult wrote it as opposed to a teen is saying it. For example "I thought things were beyond hope when Brett broke Leo's nose, but things managed to degenerate further" (p 223). I love that the chapters alternate between Gabriel and Christine first person POV, it allows us to connect with them (those poor kids go through so much), but some of the things that they say and think translate as if a teen was writing a graded paper, it's like they're trying to class up the way they speak for a better grade, so it doesn't flow as well as it could.

Other than those things, I really liked the story. It's not often that I read about dream walkers, and I've certainly never imagined anything like this. I look forward to reading book two.

I give this a 3 out of 5 stars.