Perchance to Dream by Tamara Belko is a book centered around loss, grief, and hope and it reminded me of the Crank Series by Ellen Hopkins that I had read when I was in high school.  

Perchance to Dream centers around two characters.  Grace, our main character, and Xander who is more of side character than anything else.  Grace lost her mother the year before and has sunk deep into depression.  While suffering under the burden of her mental health, her father has become an alcoholic who has given up on essentially everything.  The start of this book, the very first thing you read, is how someone died to save Grace’s life, which sets the tone for the entire book.

Full warning, this was a sad book.  One thing I really enjoyed was how Tamara was able to capture the thoughts of a teenager without making them seem childish and stupid.  I remember being a teenager and I remember so many of my thoughts, dreams, ideas, being invalidated because I didn’t know what I was talking about.  I was too young, too naïve.  Grace and Xander are going through some incredibly difficult things and it is not infantilized.  Instead we dive deep into this pain and hurt and trauma.

Grace’s story is told entirely through “prose and verse”.  As the reader, we are taken through this web of her mind, of how she is feeling, and it is incredibly powerful.  There were a couple of poems where when I was reading it, I had to stop and reread it again and again.  Even though this book was told in mostly poems, I was taken back to my teenage years.  Reading as Grace used a paperclip to mar her skin just so she could feel something hit so close to home and I felt like I was going through that again myself. 

Xander’s story is not told in prose in verse, but instead in short bursts of chapters.  I enjoyed reading chapters in Xander’s POV, but I enjoyed even more that he didn’t overstay his welcome.  I liked getting his insight on things that were happening, and I liked learning about his history and trauma from him.  When Grace revealed her cutting to him, seeing that he was weirded out, uncomfortable, and unsure of what to do was actually really nice.  I don’t know anyone that sees something like that and is instantly confident about the next steps they need to take. 

The major problems in this book rely on miscommunication, and this is one of the few books I think used that trope well.  Grace saw Xander with his ex, Becca, and immediately jumped to conclusions that he wanted to be with her again.  This is something that literally happened to me with my boyfriend when I was sixteen. 

Overall – this was a really solid book and I think Tamara did an excellent job at writing this.  Too often I see YA books that don’t make the teenage characters and their problems real and it hurts knowing adults have forgotten what it was like to be a teenager. 

Perchance to Dream – Tamara Belko

Cost* – eBook is $3.99 and Paperback is $14.99.  This book is included on Kindle Unlimited. 

*Cost is based upon what the book cost when book review is published