Review: Jake, Lucid Dreamer by David J. Naiman

Jake, Lucid Dreamer by David J. Naiman is a charming look at a middle-schooler’s struggle to navigate grief and acceptance. With a touch of the surreal, Naiman has woven a fantastical tale with a powerful message about learning to face your demons, traversing the tricky plains of middle school, and how important compassion is in the face of adversity.

Jake wakes on his birthday after one of his lucid dreams. We see his life, a typical, moody teenager – his family, a darling little sister, and a father with patience to spare. They serve as a grounding force for Jake, as his days at school are ridden with bullies and presentations. But interspersed between his daily activities, his dreams take stage and plunge the reader into a magical world reminiscent of Alice’s Wonderland. In this world, he recognizes a truth about his dead mother that the real one cannot reveal.

The prose is breezy, spoken through Jack’s voice, and is sure to hold readers of a young age. There are even some poignant poetic flourishes for everyone to enjoy: “You are the keeper of your dreams. And you are the composer of your memories.” For a book about middle-schoolers, there is the expected number of melodramatic scenes with bullies wanting to “pound” on him and pushing him into lockers, but that is woven into a highly original story.

The bully characters, Nick and Brandon, are flat in this sense, but it is not the external conflict that drives this book. Rather it is the internal one, deftly morphed into metaphor by Jake’s dreamscape, and this is where the story shines. Its message of fighting anger with reason cuts through both the real and the imagined. Lovable nonsense works to hide real lessons on how kids try to deal with adult emotions. This too is mirrored in Jake’s handling of his bully. The pen is mightier than the sword, it shows, as Brandon’s brute force is time and time again duped by Jake’s clever responses.

Although the novel can be slow at times because of certain strands of inconsequential scenes, especially those that take place in school, you are always just around the corner from Owen, the Baloo type character that guides him through his dreams. It is in the dream world where Jake is able to unlock who he really is – and with this comes ideas of self-reflection and acknowledgement. There is a core warmth to this book that manages to trump any faults in the narrative.

Overall, Jake, Lucid Dreamer is a book anyone would be happy for their child to read, or to read to their child. The dream sequences hold the reader and keep the book rolling at a steady pace. By far the greatest thread in the novel is Jake’s growth as a character, as well as his family around him, which gives the story a sincere human touch every coming-of-age book needs. Naiman shows himself to have the chops for a middle grade author – mixing in common tropes with inventive new directions, and a number of important themes for young readers.