Abducted by Gone

Gone is the last book in the Dream Catcher series by Lisa McMann. I wrote a review for the middle book, Wake, and when I did I was very clear that my review would not contain any spoilers. I knew some of my friends hadn't read the books yet and I didn't want to ruin anything for them. However, even with my warning that my review was safe to read, my friends still didn't read it!

So, this is how this review is going to go. I'm going to go ahead and write what I liked and disliked about the book. Which, depending on how anal you are about spoilers could worth reading. At the end of my post I will have a clearly defined "Spoiler Alert" section. And if you haven't read the books, you should stay away from that section! 

Without further ado, here is my review for Gone...

Let me brake it down for you. 

In Wake we meet Janie who is a young girl who can merge into the dreams others. And Janie meets a boy named Cabel and they fall in love...*sigh*!

In Fade, Janie starts to see what her dream catching capabilities can do. She learns that she just might have some options she wasn't aware of before, but she also learns that there might be some consequences...that's life, right?

In Gone, Janie has to make a choice. I mean there is a plot and a lot of stuff going on, but in the end the book boils down to Janie making a choice. 

I love these books because they are light and fun and make for a very quick read (or audio book listen). The first two books are filled with sharp concise sentences that give the tone and flow of the book an almost staccato feel to it. They are fast paced and an entirely enjoyable. 

However, the last book didn't quite fit with the others. It still had the same overall structure as the first two, but it was filled with all this back story and information that made it drag. Don't get me wrong, all of the information would go on to aid Janie in making the big decision that the book (and her life) hangs on, but it was still...well, different. Not bad, necessarily. Just different. And I think that is why some of the fans of this series maybe didn't like this book as much as the first.

I didn't like this addition to the series as much as the first two because there really wasn't much of Cabel in it. Janie is under a lot of pressure and she is facing a very inevitable fork in the rode and she chooses not to rely on Cabel when she tries to decide which path to choose. I appreciated that Janie recognized that she couldn't put the weight of this particular decision on Cabel, but I still would have liked to have him around more.

Aside from that we do get to learn more about Janie and her family and where her abilities could have come from. I suspected the majority of the information we were given about Janie from the very first book. On one hand it was nice to finally be validated, but on the other hand it was a little frustrating that it took her so long to figure it all out.

Unfortunately, there really wasn't much that I loved about the book. It was nice to see Janie again and be back in her world one last time, but other then that there wasn't much to love. I feel like this finale to the series would have worked better if the series had been longer. I loved the crime fighting aspect from the second book and if we had been given one or two more books like that one, and then Janie made her decision I would have been happier with the series ending. As it was, it just felt like it came too soon. 

Here is my overall rating of the book and then I'll put the Spoiler section after it.

I've given Gone by Lisa McMann an abduction rating of...

Now for the good stuff...

I hated the way McMann had presented Janie with her options. I felt like, the way the information was laid out for me, that if Janie chose to not become a hermit out in the country, that she would have to choose to fight crime with the detective. But I didn't feel like she had to choose that life.

I felt like she could have very easily chosen to take reasonable precautions to limit her exposure to the dreams of others without completely becoming a recluse like her father. Yes, her health would have deteriorated but it would have been a slower process. And if she wanted to go back to crime fighting after that point then so be it. Plus, it wasn't as if she has been dreaming of being a detective her whole life. That was never part of her plan for her future until Cabel came along, that is.