Review: Awoken by Sarah Noffke

Title: Awoken (The Lucidites #1)
Author: Sarah Noffke
Publisher: One-Twenty-Six Press
Release Date: November 24, 2014
Acquired Via: Author
Around the world humans are hallucinating after sleepless nights.

In a sterile, underground institute the forecasters keep reporting the same events.

And in the backwoods of Texas, a sixteen-year-old girl is about to be caught up in a fierce, ethereal battle.

Meet Roya Stark. She drowns every night in her dreams, spends her hours reading classic literature to avoid her family’s ridicule, and is prone to premonitions—which are becoming more frequent. And now her dreams are filled with strangers offering to reveal what she has always wanted to know: Who is she? That’s the question that haunts her, and she's about to find out. But will Roya live to regret learning the truth?

My Review

Even though Awoken is a dream traveling book, a lot of it seemed like a time travel book. Especially, since the dream travelers could travel back in time during their dreams. I did think that the combination of dream traveling with other powers such as mind reading or being able to see a few seconds in the future was a unique premise.

Spotlight (Interview &Giveaway): Awoken by Sarah Noffke

Title: Awoken (The Lucidites #1)
Author: Sarah Noffke
Publisher: One-Twenty-Six Press
Release Date: November 24, 2014
Around the world humans are hallucinating after sleepless nights.

In a sterile, underground institute the forecasters keep reporting the same events.

And in the backwoods of Texas, a sixteen-year-old girl is about to be caught up in a fierce, ethereal battle.

Meet Roya Stark. She drowns every night in her dreams, spends her hours reading classic literature to avoid her family’s ridicule, and is prone to premonitions—which are becoming more frequent. And now her dreams are filled with strangers offering to reveal what she has always wanted to know: Who is she? That’s the question that haunts her, and she's about to find out. But will Roya live to regret learning the truth?

Interview

Amber: Hi Sarah, thank you so much for stopping by Bibliophilia, Please! What was your inspiration or muse in creating a time/dream travel book?

Sarah Noffke: I’ve always been fascinated by dreams and sleep. Not just sleeping, but dreaming, is vital to our survival. If we don’t dream then the human brain deteriorates. REM sleep deprivation in rats has shown to cause a loss of survival behaviors, decrease of pain threshold and depression. In humans, sleep deprivation causes hallucinations because it is so crucial to brain function. All this kept me thinking about the power stored in dreams and dreaming abilities. I spun these ideas around in my head until I concocted a villain (Zhuang) who stole human’s abilities to achieve REM rendering them hallucinating zombies. And maybe also I was inspired by my own sleep deprivation at the time. My daughter was six months old and not sleeping through the night. I’m fairly certain I shouldn’t have been operating a motor vehicle.

I also had to include time travel in my books. This was a must. Time travel makes the plot really difficult, but for that reason it also adds great complexity. I LOVE Doctor Who for this reason.

Amber: Do you write full-time or do you have a day-job? If you have a day-job, what is it?