DREAM JOURNAL

Hoping to make sense of her dreams—and life—16-year-old Livy Moore begins a dream journal over the summer, as her mother approaches the final weeks of her long-fought struggle with breast cancer. After keeping her family’s pain secret for so long, Livy begins to open up to her best friend, only to find that preacher’s daughter Ruth has turned rebellious and begun cavorting with the popular crowd. Their thoughtless pranks lead to an accidental injury of a talented teen musician’s hands. The summer’s events, combined with a father who’s become a stranger through grief, leave Livy questioning life’s change and losses, its friendships and love, its gifts and memories. Although predictable to the bittersweet ending, Livy’s well-rounded character rescues this tear-jerker from becoming “one of those hideous books where the mother dies.” For teens who want edgier melodrama than Lurlene McDaniel’s. (Fiction. YA)