Hi! So I was trying to work on an Author Tidbit (since, you know, it might have been a while since the last one. . .), but my biographical-creative-juices-thingy in my head must be holding out on me because I spent too much time reading The Boondocks today instead of cleaning my room. So I decided to just go with the regular ol’ reviewing a book thing, and hopefully the AT should be up soon.

The book today is Lucid, a collaboration between screenwriters Adrienne Stoltz and Ron Bass. I’ll admit, I had several book-mood-swings while reading this book. For a while I was like “Oh! This is good!” but then I was kind of like “Hmm.” And finally, I finished it. But we’ll get to my verdict in a minute. There are two main characters in this book, Sloane and Maggie. At first glance, a stranger would see no reason why they would be friends, or even know each other; their lifestyles are so different. Maggie is a seventeen-year-old actress in New York; Sloane is your regular old teenager attending high school is Connecticut. But here’s the thing: At night, they dream each others’ lives. Maggie is Sloane. Sloane is Maggie. It’s not exactly a common set-up. But they’re doing fine. Fine. Until the lines between reality and dreams blur. Things are falling apart, kind of like when your TV’s all static-y and every now and then just a glimpse of the actual program makes it through. No one knows who’s real and who’s a fantasy. But one of them has to be.

The book starts out pretty well; the character’s voices are fresh and really well-written. Plus, I just cannot get enough of Maggie’s little sister Jade. I mean, once a  character says, “Let’s blow this fruit stand,” it’s kind of impossible not to love them. The book seemed to lose a bit of that strength as I got to the middle of the story, and one of the reasons for that may have been because the characters many times did not speak as if they were teenagers, which I just found annoying a lot of the time. For one thing, there were a lot of instances where contractions could have been used but weren’t, which to me sounded awkward. Also, I don’t know if a teenager would really say, “I am so blessed to have so and so,” casually, like they do in the book. But things did look up more at the end, and ultimately it was an okay read. But it is young adult, so don’t go getting this for any ten-year-olds.

Literary Quote of the Day: “If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, then let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture.” –Ray Bradbury, author of many works such as Fahrenheit 451 and Something Evil This Way Comes.

P.S. I would just like to note that this piece of writing is great, and also SO TRUE. Wow, that was a longer-than-usual post. How did that happen? You probably shouldn’t get used to it. Have a great day everybody!