![]() Animals end up being a coping mechanism for Jake to deal with his grief. The imagery goes deeper when Naiman takes us into Jake’s dream world. The only physical representations of animals Jake sees in the real world are the Orangutans he must study for his science project, and the little stuffed monkey named “Beenie” that is constantly hanging from his sister’s neck. In the real world Jake uses similes and cliches, mentioning various animals, such as “if it walks like a duck…” and “game of cat and mouse”, and others. It is almost always animal imagery: Jake has an unsurpassed knowledge of animals compared to his fellow characters, and so animals appear often in his life. ![]() Naiman’s use of imagery is very thorough and clever. It is an adventure from start to finish, going back and forth between the real world and Jake’s fantasy world of animals (I’d highly recommend accompanying these dream sequences with Camille Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals). He begins his titular lucid dreaming after his twelfth birthday, going into a fantasy world full of sentient animals, all who seem to have very familiar personalities. ![]() He is dealing with grief of losing his mother, and dealing with how his grief affects himself and others around him. Jake, Lucid Dreamer is about a boy named Jake, a middle schooler who lives with his father and his younger sister. Naiman is a beautifully written book, and I have little criticism to make about it. ![]()
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