Review: Lucid by Adrienne Stoltz & Ron Bass

Lucid by Adrienne Stoltz & Ron Bass
Publisher: Razorbill
Publication date: October 2nd 2013
My rating: 4.5 stars

What if you could dream your way into a different life? What if you could choose to live that life forever? Sloane and Maggie have never met. Sloane is a straight-A student with a big and loving family. Maggie lives a glamorously independent life as an up-and-coming actress in New York. The two girls couldn't be more different--except for one thing. They share a secret that they can't tell a soul. At night, they dream that they're each other. The deeper they're pulled into the promise of their own lives, the more their worlds begin to blur dangerously together. Before long, Sloane and Maggie can no longer tell which life is real and which is just a dream. They realize that eventually they will have to choose one life to wake up to, or risk spiraling into insanity. But that means giving up one world, one love, and one self, forever.

Lucid is one of the most mind boggling books I have come across in a long time, it kept me guessing until the very end and even when I finished the last page and closed my book I was still unsure about what had gone on. Despite the confusion and constant guessing on mine and Keertana’s behalf, Lucid is one of the most multi layered, rich and developed novels I have read in a long time. Having two screenwriters as its co-authors, it’s no wonder Lucid left such a great impression with me. 

Lucid weaves you into the story of Sloane and Maggie, two girls that have never met one another, but dream of one another’s lives when they go to sleep. Maggie’s therapist has put it down to the one life event which had a major effect on her life, when she lost her dad. But Maggie knows it’s been going on for much longer than that, and even though her therapist keeps telling her it’ll become dangerous if she can’t let go of Sloane, Maggie’s not sure if she can, will one girl be able to cope with the other one not around? 

Through dual pov’s from Sloane and Maggie we learn exactly how tough life has been for them. Both have experienced great losses of someone really close to them, have tense relationships with their mothers and after what has gone on are just managing to get by. From both pov’s I was able to form a stronger connection with Sloane’s character. Despite Maggie being the most resilient, the one who spoke her mind and try as I might to like Maggie, Sloane stood out as the character whose chapters and life I was looking forward to getting back to. And despite all the clues thrown our way which gave us the impression that Maggie was the real person and creating this imagined world with Sloane in it, I didn’t want this to be the case at all. I fell in love with Sloane’s world and friends and family, from her awkward and mysterious relationship she had with her mother, to the unexplained heartache over her loss, her trusting friend Gordi, and how she was always trying to outwit the new boy at school James. I’m not saying that Maggie’s life wasn’t entertaining enough, it was, but Sloane’s life for me stood out more prominently and thus I found more appealing than I did Maggie’s. So I didn’t want Maggie pulling the plug on this other life full of vibrance, first loves and endearing characters just because her therapist said so, I wanted to understand why it was all happening in the first place. 

And honestly when it was all unravelled (it did take me some time to get my head around) it was never what I expected. Actually I never would have thought of this wonderful tangled and carefully thought out major twist in the first place. I have to highly praise Adrienne Stoltz & Ron Bass for creating such a thought evoking novel such as Lucid. I adored the entire novel, but the second half was just pure brilliance, with its blurring of realities, fast pace I found myself whipping through the book in a frenzied manner. 

If there’s one thing you want to take away from my rather confusing and ambiguous review is that you need to make time to read Lucid. Lucid is one of the most imaginative books I have ever read, with its aspects of mystery, romance and heartache, it is sure to have that little bit which will appeal to the avid reader within everyone.