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A review by ksophialydia
Dreamers Often Lie by Jacqueline West
2.0
The "ending" ruined this book for me. I was going to give it a solid four stars but then I got to the 90% point and the ending was impossible to imagine and with each percentage closer to 100% the star rating dropped lower.
The writing is fantastic! The over all feel of the book is similar to Lauren Oliver's Vanishing Girls, but much darker. Jaye is fantastically unreliable, and the reader is right there with her trying to puzzle out what's a hallucination and what isn't. I had trouble putting the book down, the tension ran through the entire novel and I needed to know what the resolution would be.
Unfortunately, there is no resolution. This is an open-ended book. Normally I'm okay with such endings because they can drive you up a wall in a good way. But used here I'm left cold and upset. It feels like a copout.
I thought for sure that Jaye was going to walk onto the lake and fall through the ice and drown. With all the allusions to Romeo and Juliet (and Paris) as the book neared its end it's what I was expecting a bit. But on the flip side of that coin was Jaye's plea to Shakespeare at the end to re-write the story, to have a happy ending. So being rescued, having a second chance, -is- the happy ending she's asking for.
And that, I could live with. Jaye promises she'll do better, but she's so highly unreliable that if she's still alive and lucid at the end of the book we can't he sure she really will try to do better. If she's alive and lucid and doesn't change, then I'm angry on behalf of all the real life screw-ups who are given chance after chance at turning a new leaf but always fall back to old ways. There comes a time when it's abusive to the people trying to help them who only get their good will thrown back in their faces.
If Jaye is alive but hallucinating at the end, then the whole thing simply continues off-screen and I'm sorry but I stop caring about the crazy girl who hurts everyone around her, just as much as I stop caring about the people who let her hurt them because their love for her isn't strong enough to get her the mental health aid she clearly needs.
And if Jaye has died at the end, then it's an ending like The Giver and it's just plain unsatisfactory.
Many books centered around mental health and abuse include PSA notes at the end of their books, and I have to admit surprise one was not included in the book. Whether it was because it'd ruin readers' initial reaction to the book upon completion or because it wasn't deemed necessary, I have no idea. But this is one of the most compelling and well-written books about mental health I've read and I was expecting such a note.
On a completely different note, I continue to wish that authors would look beyond the usual titles of Shakespeare's canon. Yes, there was a letter-tearing scene that mirrored The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Yes, you could try to show Jaye's relationship with her father has similarities to Miranda and Prospero. Yes, there were shades of Othello in Pierce. But the actual references of Shakespearean characters in Dreamers Often Lie was largely confined to Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, with a dash of Macabeth and Shakespeare himself. It's a bit nit-picky but I would love to get more variety.
The writing is fantastic! The over all feel of the book is similar to Lauren Oliver's Vanishing Girls, but much darker. Jaye is fantastically unreliable, and the reader is right there with her trying to puzzle out what's a hallucination and what isn't. I had trouble putting the book down, the tension ran through the entire novel and I needed to know what the resolution would be.
Unfortunately, there is no resolution. This is an open-ended book. Normally I'm okay with such endings because they can drive you up a wall in a good way. But used here I'm left cold and upset. It feels like a copout.
I thought for sure that Jaye was going to walk onto the lake and fall through the ice and drown. With all the allusions to Romeo and Juliet (and Paris) as the book neared its end it's what I was expecting a bit. But on the flip side of that coin was Jaye's plea to Shakespeare at the end to re-write the story, to have a happy ending. So being rescued, having a second chance, -is- the happy ending she's asking for.
And that, I could live with. Jaye promises she'll do better, but she's so highly unreliable that if she's still alive and lucid at the end of the book we can't he sure she really will try to do better. If she's alive and lucid and doesn't change, then I'm angry on behalf of all the real life screw-ups who are given chance after chance at turning a new leaf but always fall back to old ways. There comes a time when it's abusive to the people trying to help them who only get their good will thrown back in their faces.
If Jaye is alive but hallucinating at the end, then the whole thing simply continues off-screen and I'm sorry but I stop caring about the crazy girl who hurts everyone around her, just as much as I stop caring about the people who let her hurt them because their love for her isn't strong enough to get her the mental health aid she clearly needs.
And if Jaye has died at the end, then it's an ending like The Giver and it's just plain unsatisfactory.
Many books centered around mental health and abuse include PSA notes at the end of their books, and I have to admit surprise one was not included in the book. Whether it was because it'd ruin readers' initial reaction to the book upon completion or because it wasn't deemed necessary, I have no idea. But this is one of the most compelling and well-written books about mental health I've read and I was expecting such a note.
On a completely different note, I continue to wish that authors would look beyond the usual titles of Shakespeare's canon. Yes, there was a letter-tearing scene that mirrored The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Yes, you could try to show Jaye's relationship with her father has similarities to Miranda and Prospero. Yes, there were shades of Othello in Pierce. But the actual references of Shakespearean characters in Dreamers Often Lie was largely confined to Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, with a dash of Macabeth and Shakespeare himself. It's a bit nit-picky but I would love to get more variety.