2 Stars.
Pros: The idea of being able to solve problems in your life by tapping into your dreams using lucid dreaming was an interesting one, but they didn't explore it in that much depth/The secrets that Keller and Gabe kept from Sylvie were surprising and frightening, and all in the name of research, yikes.
Cons: I felt that they missed an interesting opportunity to delve into the idea of lucid dreaming, being able to know and control what your dreaming and using that as a way to try and better your life/The non-linear storyline was a little confusing but after awhile it became cohesive.
Full Review:
Sylvie is a junior at a prestigious school in northern California, called Mills Academy. On the night of a lunar eclipse, she watches the event with her classmates and then a boy, Gabe, asks her to go with him to see something spectacular. They sneak into Keller, the Headmasters garden, and find a flower with twin heads. She's not all that impressed and is more appalled at the idea that they snuck into the Headmasters garden. They leave, both angry with the other and not much else changes in their dynamic.
Their Senior year they meet up again and this time grow closer. A bond is formed but Gabe is acting strangely. When they spend the night together, he never actually spends the night, he always disappears. And when Sylvie follows him one night, she again, finds him at the Headmasters house, only this time, he's actually inside the house. The Headmaster punishes him by assigning him to write a paper about boundaries etc and they're excused. Sylvie is both hurt at the fact that Gabe has never properly spent the night with her and confused at his strange behavior and the strange punishment doled out to him by Headmaster Keller.
A few days later, Gabe returns and tries to reason with Sylvie. He says that it'll all make sense eventually, that he can't tell her what's going on but that he knows for sure that she is his person, and he means that. The next day, he's gone. And she doesn't see him again until she's a Freshman at U.C. Berkley. He shows up, out of the blue and he confronts her in a coffee shop, explaining all the sordid details.
He was one of Kellers' Research Assistants while at Mills Academy and that's why he kept disappearing. He was working. Unbeknownst to Sylvie, it goes far deeper than that, and it involves her. But with the fact that Gabe is sitting there, in front of her, in the flesh, is all too surprising for her to question much. He tells her that he wants her to come to Martha's Vineyard with him and work as one of Kellers Research Assistant. And she agrees. She pulls out of Berkeley and follows Gabe to Massachusetts.
In an old Victorian house nestled on Cape Code, Sylvie learns what Kellers research consists of. He wants to try and tap into peoples dreams, teaching them how to lucid dream and interact with their subconscious as a way to try and alter their lives, fix mistakes they've made etc. It's far fetched, it's radical and it's hard to find funding, but somehow they do. And as they see patients, and the research progresses, there are both failures and successes, more or less. Some people they manage to help, while others, like Anne March, there's nothing they can do for her.
It isn't until the operation is moved to Madison, Wisconsin that Sylvie starts to uncover strange facts that are missing from Kellers files and secrets he's been keeping from them, or at least, from her. She's assigned the task of ordering patient files by number and realizes that Meredith, Kellers long dead wife, was his first patient. The more frightening aspect of this is that she killed herself. And then there's the missing file on patient 111. Whoever could that be?
All is explained of course and the end, for the most part, is satisfying. But at the same time I felt that the book took awhile to gain momentum. I didn't really start getting into it until page 150 or so, and they never really got into the actual dreams of their subjects. I think that's what I was hoping for, a narrative that was more about interacting with your dream-self than with the secrets being kept between a Scientist and his Research Assistants.
It wasn't a great read but it wasn't a terrible one either. The Immortalists was spell binding, simply for its slight touch of "kind of out there, did this fortune teller actually tell the kids the days of their deaths or are they living their lives off of that knowledge and thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy" mystical feeling. The Anatomy of Dreams was more a mystery novel, wrapped up in secrets and though it was entertaining, I was disappointed that it left out the "mystical" part of what the synopsis could have had.
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