Dreamland

Dreamland is a young adult novel by Sarah Deesen. It is a novel about a teenage girl and the struggles she goes through when her older sister runs away from home, and she finds love. Having to live in her sister's shadow was nothing compared to living with her absence. It makes her even more invisible to her parents. As she struggles to find out who she is, without her sister (with whom she was very close), she finds love in a boy from another school. What follows is a path of destructive behavior that she cannot find her way out of. The novel is about friendship, family and love, and about finding your own dreams in spite of what someone else wants for you. I think it also sends a message to teenagers about the dangers in certain relationships and how our choices can drastically affect our futures.

This novel was hard to read as a parent. Watching this girl go down a dangerous path, while her parents are not looking, was very difficult to witness. She starts out with such a good head on her shoulders, but one person changes that. Her relationship with this one boy threatens her friendships and her relationship with her parents, and ultimately her life. It was scary to think of what could happen when a teenager doesn't tell anyone about what is going on in her life. She gets so involved and falls so heavily, that even though she knows things are bad, she does nothing to stop them. In the end, her recovery from these events takes a long time.

The sister makes some choices that affect her future, as well. She was set to go to an ivy league college, and leaves town because she doesn't feel like this was her dream. She feels it was what her parents wanted. She leaves this incredible future behind for a boy. I think the author was trying to get the reader to sympathize with the sister's character, but I just couldn't do it. It was so hard to read about those choices and try to sympathize, because as an adult and a parent all I could see was what she was throwing away. I could only imagine how I would have felt if these were my children.

I think the author romanticized life a bit, and I suppose most novelists do. But I think that is dangerous in a young adult novel. None of the struggle the sister must have faced was noted in the novel, and it does not go far enough into the future to truly show how her choices affect the rest of her life. This is not a book I would really want my teenage daughter to read. If she ever did, I would need to discuss the books themes with her, specifically the older sister's path, to ensure that she understood that life isn't that simple.

Overall it was a good book, and maybe an important one for parents to read. It is certainly important to read it if your children have.

Happy Reading!