Alice: From Dream to Dream (Giulio Macaione)

Alice: From Dream to Dream
Giulio Macaione with Giulia Adragna
BOOM! Box
Fiction, MG Fantasy/Graphic Novel
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Coming back to her home town of Cincinnati, where her best friend Jamie lives, should've been a happy time for Alice. They're even living in the same house she grew up in. Instead, Alice is barely holding herself together. Not only is she mercilessly bullied by the popular girls - spearheaded by Taisha, who has a crush on Jamie - but they're only here because her dad lost his job in Chicago, which means her parents are too stressed to care about her problems. On top of that, she's stuck rooming with her big brother Louis... which means that, every night, she slips into his nightmares.
Nobody understands it, how she involuntarily experiences the dreams of anyone she sleeps near. Her parents don't believe her; she only tried to tell them once, and it didn't go well. Jamie's the only one who knows, the only one she can confide in. So when he starts acting strange and pushing her away, she has nobody left to turn to. And when he gets hit by a car and falls into a coma, she may be his only chance at survival - if she can figure out what he's hiding in his dreams...

REVIEW: A quick-reading graphic novel, Alice: From Dream to Dream is less an exploration of the title character's peculiar ability and more about the secrets we all hide in our waking lives, the fears and stresses that come out in our sleep, and how one girl must cope with not just her own problems, but the problems of those around her, the ones they sometimes don't even admit they have. Between a distant teenage brother who resents having to share a room with her and ongoing friction between her parents (tied not only into Dad's joblessness and financial issues, but to a ghost from Mom's past who haunts her figuratively even as it haunts Alice literally), Alice really has nowhere to go for help except Jamie and, later, an unexpectedly understanding school counselor (who, by that alone, bears zero resemblance to any counselor I ever met in school... but, I digress.) When he discovers a secret from his father's past, he's so distraught he pushes her away... until he lands in a coma, and Alice risks her own life to reach out to him via her gift. Characters have a little more to them than is initially apparent, and even bullies have their demons; if the edges ultimately feel a little blunt, this appears to be aimed at the younger crowd. The imaginative dream imagery helps make up for some predictability in the overall story arc. In the end, while I wavered a little bit on what felt like unresolved or unexplored elements, I wound up giving it the benefit of the doubt given the target audience.

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