For as long as Alice can remember, she’s dreamed of Max. Several nights a week, he shows up, and over the years, they’ve developed a deep friendship and a fairly recent romantic relationship. Alice knows he’s not real, though. He’s an imaginary being, a dream-creature. Except that on the first day of school in a new area, Max is right there. He’s real…only he doesn’t seem to recognize her at all.

I have no idea where I first heard about this book. It was ages ago, back in the fall, and I’ve been dying to read it ever since. It came out in April, and still my library didn’t get a copy. Finally this month, an e-book and an e-audiobook popped up, and I snatched at both immediately. The audio was the first hold to reach me, and I listened to the entire book in a single day.

Recently, I mentioned all the “instant turn-ons” I have in books, and shared dreams is definitely one of them. The thing is, books with those turn-ons generally fall to either extreme for me. Either I love them unreasonably, or they disappoint me horribly. Dreamology was a fall-in-love book. Yeah, it had its issues, especially toward the end. There were things I wanted to know more about, and things I didn’t like. Mostly, though, I just fell in love with the whole story. I loved the idea of dream-bleeding, the edges of reality starting to act like the illogical nature of dreams, and the various friendships that develop through the book. I loved the weird science lab Alice visits and her grandmother’s quirky home. I even loved the sprinkling of locations I either visited or heard about while living in Boston, where the book takes place.

Like I said, it’s not a perfect book, but it was a good one for me. Everything I could’ve hoped it to be.

Performance: This book is read by Erin Spencer, who did a great job. I don’t usually listen to YA on audio because narrators tend to read them whiny/angsty/perpetually cynical, and while there were some of those moments here, it wasn’t constant, so it sounded like a real person!