Marianne Dreams and so do I! (Marianne Dreams - Catherine Storr)

Member Name: angiepanj

Product:	Marianne Dreams - Catherine Storr
Date:	29/06/04 (559 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Can appeal on many different levels, Well considered characters, Memorable, haunting story

Disadvantages: very thin book for the price, may give you nightmares!

If you ever hear a book described as haunting- this should be the story that immediately springs to mind. I read this book first when I was twelve, but have returned to it many times since then. Marianne Dreams grabs you from the start, and provides by turns a touching story of first love, an insight into the life of an invalid child, and the feeling of vague discomfort and horror that only a true fairy story can provide.

The main character, which is of course named Marianne, suffers an unnamed illness, which leaves her weak and convalescing. During this long, dull convalescence period, she creates for herself a dream world, with the assistance of an indelible pencil which she receives a gift. Through out the book, the reader is left to decide whether they see the dream world as simply an imaginative reflection of Marianne's current situation, or whether the world into which Marianne retreats in her dreams is truly the creation of the magic pencil.

Whilst on her sickbed, Marianne is tutored by a governess, who regales her with tales of another ill child, a boy called Mark. Marianne's adventures begin when she draws a picture of a house, and later adds a picture of a boy in the window looking out at her. The story takes quite a scary turn when Marianne has a fight with the dream Mark, and begins to draw monstrous entities in her picture.

The characters drawn by the author are well done, realistically portraying both the temper and the turbulent wishes of an adolescent. The story, to me, conveys a great sense of waiting, even as it continues, Marianne is waiting impatiently for the day when she can get out of her sickbed and rejoin the world she has been forced to leave behind for a while. Although the story has a real elemental power to draw you in to it, you still get the feeling that Marianne is glad when you get to the end of the story, where she is allowed to move on. This does not detract from the book, but seems to add anoth
er layer of mystery to it.

To conclude then, I would recommend this book to anyone, from the age of twelve upwards. This is one of the books that started off my sci-fi/fantasy addiction, and I believe that it would be great for getting a young person into reading more, or even for any adult who still loves to read a chilling fairy tale.

It is quite a thin book, although I'm usually a great exponent of judging the value of a book by the amount it weighs, in this case i would put forward this book as being the exception to
the rule. I may be written for teenagers, but there is nothing of the usual condesending manner which many authors suffer from when writing for this age group. It may not take very long to read (and I am a definate example of this) but it does stick with you a long time! Definately value for money!

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