Gone

Gone (Wake series) Review

Review by Nicholas Brands Smit


GONE by Lisa McMann is the last book in the trilogy of the New York Times best selling series WAKE. This book deals with very interesting concepts about dreams, how we forget what happened, and in this case, how others remember. It follows a girl who has some very, very serious choices to make. The pressure from her friends and her survival instinct are crushing each other, about to destroy her mind. She needs to get away from it all, but her alcoholic mother would not be able to handle it. She is challenged with Morton's Fork, a dilemma when you have to choices and both options suck. The dreams that she is jumping into unwillingly are leaving her weaker and weaker, then her already crappy life is turned upside down when a man who Jane considers a stranger shows up for the first time in years. Her dreams are telling her things that are private to people, and completely change her opinion on them. Lisa Mcmann focuses on her struggles as Jane deals with an boyfriend distraught with indecision, and a mystery to be solved.


The WAKE series is interesting in the way that is unique, it's ideas on dreaming portrayed through the intriguing character of Jane make it's concepts easy to understand whilst allowing the reader to understand more profoundly the meanings behind it. Jane finds out more and more about herself and what she wants to do because other people's unspoken thoughts, which come out and haunt them in their worst nightmares. Instead of just focusing on the dreaming part or Jane's stereotypical social life, Lisa Mcmann mixes the two together with a perfect balance, making young adults able to relate whilst being drawn into a supernatural tale. Jane's seeming normal issues which most people go though can be mixed in with her dreaming problems solely because of this fact.
Although the last few books relied on classroom interactions and disasters caused by the semi-comatose state she went in when she is pullled into a dream, including car accidents and stunned patients in a hospital to keep the story moving along, this one relied on her boyfriend Cabel's and her father's troubling dreams to propel the story towards it's climax.
What's down right bad about it? In the other books, there was a large group of intresting protagonists, now it seems to only focus on Jane. Despite this, I like GONE... Yet not as much as the other two WAKE books.