Dream For MeRating: 4.75 stars
Buy Link:
Amazon | All Romance
Length: Novel


Two hundred years in the future, humans don’t sleep.  After the Mutation Event, babies were born without the need to sleep.  Except for about a hundred people left in the world, everyone else can go for 24 hours with only short rest periods to recharge.  Jacob Garcia is a sleeper, the only known sleeper left in America.  Since he needs to sleep, and loses a third of his life that way, he is labeled as disabled and subsists on the government’s dime.  He also agrees to be tested and observed at the government’s insistence.

Dr. Akshay Mistry is a scientist studying sleep with the hopes of creating a better way to anesthetize people for surgery.  Shay finally has a chance to study Jacob and it’s quite a coup that he’s given the opportunity.  What he doesn’t expect is to be so completely attracted to Jacob.  Once it’s clear that the attraction is mutual, Shay puts a stop to it.  It would be unethical to get involved with his test subject.  As soon as the study is over though, all bets are off.  Their attraction goes deep and they begin a relationship.

But there is something sinister at work.  A cell of sleepers is convinced that the government wants to use the data from the sleep studies to make a “sleep bomb.”  It could be used to throw the world into chaos.  Jacob is more involved that he’s let on, but when he finally tells Shay the truth, only Shay’s love for him keeps Shay from bolting.  What the two men discover goes farther than either of them suspected.  Now Jacob and Shay have to put themselves on the line to stop something very bad from going down.

All right.  If you haven’t already figured this out about me, I’m a geek.  So when I read the blurb for this one, I immediately snatched it up.  A futuristic world where people no longer need to sleep?  Right up my alley.  And I am so glad I got the chance to read this book.

The world Black created is at once familiar and foreign.  It’s a future we can all recognize, but for the fact that no one needs to sleep.  Going for twenty four hours a day, people are much more productive than ever before.  What I particularly liked was that it was absolutely believable.  This wasn’t some great utopian society, or even dystopian.  It was solidly in the middle, much like the real world today, and it was easy to get immersed in it.  I could easily picture the world, with its credit chips, automated and electric cars, and personal terminals.  With the way technology advances, it was an easy step into this book.

Jacob Garcia is my kind of guy.  Doing what he needs to in order to get by in this world, he has a chip on his shoulder and a grumpy personality.  Most of the time.  But he also has a soft heart underneath, and he is intensely loyal.  When his loyalty shifts to Shay, it was easy to see why.  His love and affection for the man just leapt off the page.  Jacob is the kind of guy that wants to do the right thing, and he isn’t above changing his mind when new facts are presented.  Every choice Jacob made, every action, had solid basis in his character and I understood him and his motivations completely.

Shay is another fascinating character.  He’s lived his life awake for twenty-four hours and used that time to become a neurologist. When you have intellect and essentially endless time to learn and study, it’s an easy thing to do.  But he’s got layers too.  A warm heart, unbreakable ethics, and a charming personality.  Yes, he wants to study Jacob.  But Shay really sees the man as a person and not just a test subject.  I loved the way these two men connected.  Sharing their personal lives with each other as they did the study really gave a solid base to their relationship.  I loved their interactions, and I especially loved being in Shay’s head as he watched Jacob sleep.  Perhaps it was a little bit instalove, as they weren’t together very long before they made those declarations, but it worked here.  They guys were great together.

But this wasn’t just a story about two men falling in love.  There is a much deeper plot at work here.  I don’t want to give anything away, but the cell of sleepers has a much more nefarious plan than just proving that the government has been researching sleep for dark purposes.  I really liked the way this all played out.  There way one single moment where I felt that a piece of information was revealed and it felt out of the blue.  But I was willing to let that go and ride this story for all it was worth.

One of the things that Black included in the story were people who were hypnophiles—people obsessed with sleep and those who actually could sleep.  I thought this was a fantastic inclusion, because it made perfect sense to me.  In a world where so few people actually experience sleep, it’s easy to see how there would be those that would be attracted to it and even become obsessed with it.  This gave the world an even more real feeling.

I thought this book had an incredibly interesting premise, and the author really pulled off telling a great story.  I was invested from word one, loving the world Black painted with her words.  This was a really wonderful love story, with a mystery full of twists and turns that kept me entertained and invested.  I highly recommend Dream For Me.

kris signature