Review of John Dreamer by Elise Celine

Andy wasn’t usually sure about much, but she was absolutely certain this was the weirdest day of her life as she stood stranded in the middle of a great white room with six strangers. Well, they were mostly strangers. She could have sworn she’d seen the guy with the green eyes before, and maybe that was why he kept staring at her.

When a man calling himself the Guardian appeared and said they had come to make their deepest dreams come true, they embark on an adventure none of them ever imagined, and the consequences of their actions would change them forever.

I was contacted by NetGalley informing me that this book was available to read and I was immediately attracted to it's odd but beautiful cover. John Dreamer follows seven different teens as they discover things about themselves that they never knew, seen through the eyes of Andy, our main character.

The base of this has a really strong, unique plot. I was reminded of the film Cube, except there was much less death and violence. Each teenager has a chair that reflects their personalities and as Andy was the first to arrive it was fun to guess the type of person that might belong to each chair. 

However, there were a fair few things that bogged this read down for me personally. As I met Andy as soon as she arrived in the room, I wasn't able to get a sense of who she was and she felt like a stranger to me. I really wanted to feel like I was following her on a journey but instead I was following around someone I didn't really know. Her character development doesn't really improve throughout the book and neither does anyone else's really (cardboard characters) which is strange because character development is kind of what the story is about. We also lost two characters just as we were starting to get to know them, too.

I felt the romance wasn't really needed and it wasn't subtle either. She falls in love with John as soon as she sees him and this was like having an annoying fly buzzing around my head while I was trying to read a good story. I have no idea why she liked John or why he liked her either. This is just one of the author's strange decisions. Another was to wait until 70% of the story before switching the point of view for a chapter and then back again. The worst was the title itself. John is the love interest and by making his name the title, to me it was almost like saying that the story wasn't important, only John was. Overall, this is a strange book that needed quite a lot more work before being published, however I did enjoy it and will be looking out for the sequels. 

3/5