ByMarlida

It's not a dystopia, which actually made me kind of sad because I loved Gemma and Harper in the book. Anyways, Wake is mainly about Gemma who's a swimmer and Gemma's older sister Harper. In their home town some strange girls suddenly come during tourist season - and they're beautiful as hell. Everyone wants to be them, only Harper and Gemma kind of think there's something strange about them. Suddenly the strange girls start approaching Gemma, and she's suddenly under their "spell".

It's just as much as a story about love and family as it is the paranormal. Hocking kind of does that right, by making some family dynamics that is interesting to read about, and it's actually that, that makes me want to read further. I can't say that I'm particularly interested in Gemma's love interest, but Harper's. Because I kind of see myself in Harper, the protective older sister who would practically do anything for my two younger siblings. And, by all means, I'm older, and closer to Harper's age than Gemma's - and I can absolutely like her interests in Daniel. 

It's not that there's a lot of things that I don't like about the book, but I kind of didn't feel like finishing when I was about halfway through. I don't know if it was because I was kind of sad that it wasn't dystopia, because I was seriously SO sure that it was - but I think it was rather the fact that Gemma was hard to relate to. I mean, the fact that Gemma is a swimmer and knows that this is what she wants to do with her life, then why would she ever miss practice? And the fact that both her older sister and her father kind of hates her going out to the bay in the middle of the night to swim, she does it anyways, because, hey I love swimming under the stars. I get that, but, I don't get it, if you get what I'm trying to incline? 

There's a lot of things that I feel like doesn't seem right. First of all, the three girls, why is it that they make everything so public. I mean, if they want to talk to Gemma, why not just talk to her like normal people instead of cornering her at the dock, threatening her? If something like what happened to Gemma happened to me, I would tell my sister, and my father, and probably my boyfriend too. I would be freaking out, not, ah, I had a bruise a minute ago but now it's gone, how strange, well, now I'm going to kiss my boyfriend. It's not how a normal teenager would have acted. And through all of this, it seems like Gemma has no friends whatsoever. She has her sister Harper, and Alex is Harper's friend, and therefore Gemma's friend, but Gemma doesn't mention ONE friend throughout the entire book. Not that I can recall. It's not entirely normal to not have any friends if you're on a swimming team in high school. 

Anyways, I could rant about this all day, and I'm not going to do that. It was a book worth reading since I like fantasy, but it's not a book I would consider mentioning for any of my friends until they told me that they liked mermaid books, or greek mythology for that sake. And to mention it, yes, the names of the sirens in greek mythology are correct, and the sake of muses and gods are also correct. So it was good background work by Hocking.