REVIEW: As I Wake

Title:  As I Wake
Author: Elizabeth Scott 
Genre:  YA, Dystopian, Sci-Fi
Publisher: Dutton Books (imprint of Penguin)
Format:  Hardcover
# of pages:  269
Source:  library
Links: goodreads

Summary:
(from goodreads)
Ava is welcomed home from the hospital by a doting mother, lively friends, and a crush finally beginning to show interest. There's only one problem: Ava can't remember any of them - and can't shake the eerie feeling that she's not who they say she is.

Ava struggles to break through her amnesiac haze as she goes through the motions of high-school life, but the memories that surface take place in a very different world, where Ava and familiar-faced friends are under constant scrutiny and no one can be trusted. Ava doesn't know what to make of these visions, or of the boy who is at the center of them all, until he reappears in her life and offers answers . . . but only in exchange for her trust.

Review:
I randomly picked As I Wake up at the library the last time I was there.  Something drew me to it, but I'm not sure exactly what.  The cover is definitely intriguing, so it might have been that.  Anyway, it's written differently than most books are.  It can get repetitive, and the way the sentences and paragraphs are structured can make for stilted reading, but that didn't really bother me.  I know it bothered a lot of people to the point that they could no longer enjoy the book, but I felt like it was part of creating the character's voice.  After all, you are hearing from Ava's point of view, so you only know what Ava knows.  And at the beginning, Ava knows nothing.

This whole book is about Ava learning about who she is and what happened to her.  She's trying to piece together what happened because she feels that she doesn't belong in this world that she's in.  And she just so happens to be right.  As the book progresses, we begin to learn little by little that she's from a parallel universe, but it isn't until the very end that we learn who was responsible for her and Morgan being found out and thus for her being sent to this other universe.  I thought this was a very intriguing plot, what with traveling through parallel universes and time travel, and I did not guess the person who tattled about her and Morgan to Clementine.

Overall, I enjoyed reading this book, but I was left with questions at the end and I don't think there's a sequel, so that kind of sucks.  Elizabeth Scott created these alternate universes and rules for traveling between them, but the end left me confused because it didn't follow one of the rules she had set out.  But I may be missing something, so who knows.

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