A Little Like Waking (Adam Rex)

A Little Like Waking
Adam Rex
Roaring Brook Press
Fiction, YA Fantasy
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Zelda's day started like any other. She woke in her bedroom in the little yellow house, she heads out through the front gate whose creaking sounds like a friendly frog, she went jogging into town past the frisbee-playing boys by the couthouse, she smiled at the clown in the laundromat, and suddenly realized she had a geology (or is it geometry?) quiz in five minutes... but today, she grabs a bike and tries to beat the bell to class, cutting in front of a car - and that's when she sees him: a teen boy, who tries to warn her of the danger she doesn't see until nearly too late.
A boy she has never seen before - and she knows every face in town like her own fingerprints.
The next morning, she wakes again in her bedroom, and goes out again on a jog... but she can't shake the memory of the stranger, or the sense that something isn't quite right about the world around her. It's all a little too perfect, like something out of a dream. But is she the dreamer, or is someone else - and what will happen when it's time to wake up for real?

REVIEW: It's very, very seldom that a book can pull of a "dream" ending without becoming an automatic wall-bouncer. It's a different matter entirely when the book admits it's a dream upfront - and when the question at its heart is who the dreamer is, and what the dream is trying to accomplish for them, what story their mind needs to tell itself, before they're allowed to wake. This makes the dream and its inhabitants matter, and allows the reader to invest in them and their fates. With frequently surreal imagery and imaginative turns of phrase, Adam Rex captures the peculiar nature and illogical logic of dreams, which can so often seem much, much bigger than the insides of a single human mind, populated by people and places that can feel as solid as anything in the waking world - complete with sounds, textures, scents, tastes, and even (despite the popular trope) pain.
From the first ring of her alarm clock, Zelda's world is both too perfect and too strange to be truly real, but she never thinks to question it, or question how everything and everyone seems to center on her; the town's inhabitants all know her by name even if she doesn't know them, and the Frisbee bros remind her of the test she's about to miss... even though part of her knows she's graduated already. But it's only the arrival of the stranger, Langston, that shakes her complacency... that, and when she hears a strange, deep, disembodied voice that nobody else hears. The arrival of Patches the cat, who not only died when she was a young girl but now speaks with a decidedly philosophical and poetic bent, also helps tip the scales, as does the realization that she cannot seem to read long stretches of words; letters can be jumbled, and she might read small bits and pieces but they change as often as not when she blinks or looks away. When she alerts the rest of the town to the fact that they're all in a dream, chaos erupts; every one of them believes themselves to be the dreamer, as they all have lives and memories... and the rest cannot handle the idea that they and their memories aren't real, because they are so very real to themselves. Zelda is certain she's the one - doesn't everything in this place seem to center on her? - but Patches also makes convincing arguments, and neither can entirely rule out the shy boy Langston. But this dream has been going on an awfully long time, and grown impossibly complex; surely something must be very, very wrong with whoever is dreaming this world into being. Thus, Zelda determines to find a way to wake up, accompanied by Patches and Langston. Thus begins a trek to the edge of the dream... but any mind that has stayed this deep in slumber is not one that wants to face the waking world, and innumerable distractions and obstacles soon emerge. As the trio travel and navigate challenges, they continue to wonder which of them is the real person, or if any of them are; it's entirely possible that each of them is just a fragment of the dreamer, bits and pieces of their personality given independent form, either to work through something or simply through the random dance of neural electrical firings in a possibly-damaged brain.
Even given the inherent peculiarity of life in a (literal) dream world, the story managed to keep my interest and make me care about the characters (especially Patches) - even knowing that some (or even all) might not "survive" the ending. Given how hard they work for the sake of the dreamer, the lengths they go to in order to unravel each complication and persist in their quest to wake up, slowly piecing together what happened to create a dream this deep and determined to persist, it becomes a true quest requiring true sacrifice... and even if they aren't all "real" in a conventional sense, they're more than real enough to do their part, and some spark of them may well live on (skirting spoilers, the events of the dream and what the dreamer experiences and learns do indeed matter in the waking world, so it wasn't all wasted effort; some parts of the dream, therefore, do live on beyond the end of the dream itself, and in some way always will).
As a closing note, one point where Rex "failed" in capturing dream logic is where the dream characters don't recognize that they're not real when confronted. In my experience, you never ask a someone in a dream if they're real if you don't want to know, because they will tell you the truth (and it will depress you far more than it will them, because danged if some of the best people I meet aren't in my own dreams).

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