THE HAT DIARIES

In this trilogy opener, 13-year-old Ryan Rigbee experiences dreams with inscrutable connections to reality.

As he records in glibly self-analytical diary entries, the series of hats Ryan brings home from the haberdashery where his widowed mom works lead to nocturnal visions. He dreams of heroic performances as a firefighter, police officer, safari guide, surgeon, and more—each time rescuing or at least meeting Violet, his crush. He also encounters his parents, mostly at actual moments from their lives that they’d never previously mentioned. The adventures are lifelike, and some leave him with tangible souvenirs, like the prayer beads his mother-to-be gives him at an ashram (in a chapter that’s inexplicably prefaced with a stock photo of a Muslim child). Each time, Ryan’s either bailed out at the crunch, or special knowledge to manage the crises magically comes to him. Meanwhile, he pines for a kennel dog who shows up in every dream, and Merlo, his mom’s hat factory co-worker who somehow knows about his nighttime adventures, becomes an instant father figure who suggests that the dreams are preparing him for real life. Notwithstanding Ryan’s broad hint that the dreams are “some sort of foreshadowing” and his assurances that he’s shed his “formerly insecure layer” for a “newly confident one,” readers will be hard put to make the connections between experience and growth and will remain unconvinced by the premise. The cast reads white.

An illogical tangle of apparently random incidents.