DREAMOLOGY

When Alice starts at a new high school, she finds the boy she’s been dreaming of her entire life.

For as long as she can remember Alice has had wild and whimsical adventures in her sleep with a magnificent guy, Max. In her dreams, they’ve grown up together and fallen deeply in love. So it blows her mind when she enters her new high school only to meet, face to face, the boy of her dreams in real life. Turns out he’s been dreaming of her too. Trying to get to the bottom of the sleep-time mystery brings them to the Center for Dream Discovery, where, as youngsters, they were both sent due to nightmares. How and why they have linked dreams that are now oozing into waking life are the big questions. What begins as potentially intriguing, light sci-fi gradually devolves into preposterousness that doesn’t even try to make sense. Alice’s first-person, present-tense narration is laced with puerile dream sequences that are more silly (giant Oreo cookies delivered in pizza boxes, Kate Moss as a flea-market vendor) than story-advancing. If readers are after a tale in which every character finds a soul mate, then this fluff is a success. Otherwise, the story diminishes in interest and plausibility as wacky, parrot-hoarding dream analysts attach thingamabobs to Max and Alice to disunite their dreams.

Formulaic teen romance decorated with science-fiction mishmash.