There is something to be said for authors that refuse to write the "Hollywood ending." They believe in their stories enough to write characters that need more than a big screen smooch to resolve their conflicts. Instead, these authors take the chance of writing an extended resolution, arguing, I imagine, that it takes time to resolve the problems people have. I would argue that novels that have a strong sense of resolution, something more than the sum of its tied-up-loose-ends, make a more enduring impact on us than their counterparts.

The resolution of Dreamland takes up 32 pages of a 250 page novel, which I suspect some readers will find a little long.

But it's good.

Caitlin O'Karen's older sister, Cass, runs away from to be with her boyfriend, even though she has been accepted to Yale and has parents that can afford to send her there. Caitlin, just turned sixteen, has always been the younger sister. Now, she has to find herself in the absence of Cass. However, no matter how hard she tries, she finds that the people around her act as though she is the new Cass.

It is only when Caitlin is with Rogerson Biscoe that she feels free of her sister's shadow and her parents' expectations. Rogerson drives a sleek BMW, his report card is impressive, and his counselors think he's "driven but misguided." He has dreadlocks that alarm parents everywhere and a look in his eyes that cannot be understood. He is very dreamy, and he is the love interest that Caitlin thinks will set her free.

Unfortunately, he does not transport Caitlin to a "dreamland" that Sinatre might sing about. Dreamland is not a romance novel. It's not even a "not a romance novel" in the way that Twilight is not a romance novel.

Rogerson sells pot "and other illegals," his father beats him, and he has a way of getting Caitlin to do things that she knows are wrong. Still, she thinks, it's better than cheer leading, right? That is, spoiler alert, until Rogerson hits Caitlin for the first time. At this point, Dreamland takes a turn for the dark. We come to realize that Caitlin, the battered girlfriend, is receding from reality and entering a sort of dreamland. Her grades are dropping, her squad tries to stage an intervention, and one teacher asks her to "wake up."

Sadly, Caitlin doesn't know how to proceed.

The climax Dreamland details how Caitlin escapes Rogerson's control, but it is not until the resolution that we see the true Caitlin emerge. I like how Dessen guides Caitlin through her convalescence. Her recovery would not make for a very good "Hollywood ending." If this were a film, we might expect the proper ending to be brief, a few scenes in which Caitlin, rising up with all of her sense of self, overthrows her violent male oppressor.

Instead, Dessen suggests that the psychology of the battered woman requires a more complicated narrative. I'll admit that I was impressed to see all of this in a novel marketed to young adults.

Re-read 4/28/17: Revisited this book for the first time since middle school and I loved it even more now than I did then. Classic Sarah Dessen is my favorite. I'll re-read her older books for the rest of my life. So damn good.

The book Dreamland by Sarah Dessen is in 1st person and narrated by the protagonist, Caitlin. The book is about how Caitlin’s older sister Cassandra runs away from home on Caitlin’s sixteenth birthday and to relieve Caitlin’s stress at home and school she begins a relationship with a boy named Rogerson. Rogerson in Caitlin’s words is a mysterious, brilliant, and dangerous boy. But what ends up happening is she finds out he’s very abusive and he physically and mentally hurts her. Caitlin has no idea what to do or who to tell. Will she end up telling he best friend Rina and/or her parents or stay bottled up?

I would say Sarah Dessen did a good job writing the book and keeping her readers entertained. There was never really a time where I wanted to put the book down. Caitlin was always so troubled, gloomy, lost, and reluctant throughout the whole book. She didn’t really change since she was always in a bad situation and couldn’t get Rogerson out of her head. The plot was very believable because you don’t know things like this happen all over the world. In a movie called “The Little Shop of Horrors”, one of the characters named Audrey was in a situation like this. The endings however were completely different. They weren’t all that same except the fact that they were both very enjoyable. The book was very descriptive and filled with images. The way Sarah Dessen described the characters, scene, and action it would create a movie in your head. She also used very simple vocabulary which made the whole book very easy to understand and read. However, the plot was sometimes unclear, she could have explained better. I still enjoyed the pace from scene to scene it was good and Sarah Dessen had very well-developed ideas which made her story original.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who’s just looking for a laid-back, cool book. Once you start reading Dreamland, I guarantee you’ll just love it. The beginning may start out slow but it’ll turn out better towards the end. Once you start reading you’ll see what I mean. It’s so hard to put the book down and get your eyes off of it. Middle school and high school students should definitely read this book. I also recommend this book to young adults.

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Sarah Dessen was my jam when I was in high school. Nobody wrote that sweet, sweet angst like she did. Ordinary girls, all caught up in their ordinary problems, lost in their own heads. As an introvert with depression, who was painfully lost in my own head, the narrators of these books really resonated with me. I liked how all of them had a sort of "small town" feel, peopled with side characters who had just as much personality as the narrator. It made them feel so real.



DREAMLAND was one of my favorite books of hers, which is why I decided it would be the first Dessen book I picked for my rereading project. I would say that after JUST LISTEN, it's also the darkest. The book opens with the heroine, Caitlin, finding out that her perfect, Yale-bound sister, Cass, has run away with her boyfriend without telling anyone where she's going. As the family deals with this loss, Caitlin remains in her sister's shadow, trying to fill the void in her life with cheerleading and parties, reluctantly following in her sister's steps.



Then she meets Rogerson and everything changes.



Rogerson is a rich bad boy. He's smart but unmotivated and works dead end jobs, while attending his parents' social functions and selling drugs on the side. He's also an abuser who demands more and more of Caitlin's time, isolating her from her friends and family and then, eventually, turning physical. I thought the way that this story is structured was really brutal because at first it feels like one of those toxic bad boy romances-- so when Rogerson hits Caitlin for the first time, you really feel her shock. It's your shock, too. It feels like such a betrayal. And it is.



DREAMLAND is definitely going to be triggering for some readers but I'm glad I read it, now and back then. Because Dessen does a great job showing cycles of violence, how there are different types of unhealthy relationships (maybe not all of them abusive, but definitely toxic), and how helpless and dissociated people can become to such violence, answering that tiring age-old question, "Why don't you just leave?" It's an emotional read but a worthy one and it holds up really well. Definitely recommend.



4 to 4.5 stars

In Dreamland, Sarah Dessen writes the story of Caitlin, a high school student whose life completely changes when her seemingly perfect sister up and leaves in the middle of the night, forgoing her acceptance to Yale and baffling her family. Caitlin doesn't understand why Cass left and is a little lost as a result of her absence. Without giving too much of the plot away, Caitlin ends up making choices that are completely out of character for her and she gets in way over her head. And I feel like this isn't a spoiler but a necessary revelation to anyone that is interested in reading this book: there is heartwrenching physical and verbal abuse in this book. I listened to it on audiobook and I would be sitting at a light, staring in front of me, with my mouth agape. I just couldn't believe what was happening.

I think that aspect of the book really took me by surprise because I wasn't expecting it. I listened to three other Dessen works over the summer and, while they dealt with some heavy issues they were not even remotely close to the intensity of this book.

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I couldn't believe Caitlin stayed with Rogerson so long. I couldn't believe that she didn't just leave him after that first incident in the car. But I can. From the facts we all learn about domestic abuse, I found that reading Caitlin seemed like it followed characteristics and actions of someone in an abusive relationship. It felt real and it felt like, while I didn't want Caitlin to make the decisions she did, her choices weren't unbelievable in the real of abusive relationships. I was ecstatic that she had so much aftercare.

3.5 actual rating

this is what colleen hoover tried (and failed) to do with it ends with us

i read this SUPER young and it was my first brush with DV but i truly feel like i took a lot away from it and i stand by my belief that sarah dessen girlies became emily henry girlies ❤️‍

Want to see more bookish things from me? Check out my Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfer...

3.5 Stars

One morning, Caitlin wakes up to her older sister, Cass, missing. She's always been in her sister's perfect shadow and although she misses her, she is glad she can find her own path now. When Caitlin meets Rogerson, her whole life is turned upside down. He's everything she's ever wanted in a boyfriend.... until he's not.

I think this is the first Sarah Dessen book I thoroughly enjoyed. It's heartbreaking and enlightening all at once. I hated the path Caitlin was taking and wanted to shake her at times. I would have gotten the heck out of there as soon as possible, but I understand that being in the situation she was in is a lot different when you're actually in it. The book is an extremely fast read and has an amazing flow to it. It was hard to put down because I NEEDED to know what was going to happen next. I'm glad that Sarah Dessen chose to portray this story the way that she did, I thought it was a very real take on the topic and thought it was very well done.

1 ⭐️
This book was too much for me, I was unaware of what it contained, and how it needed severe trigger warnings. I went into it expecting a romance and got a lot of other components instead. I felt like this book tricked me and not in a plot twist sort of way, it tricked my emotions. I found the last 150 pages very hard to read due to abusive components, and I think the difference to these abusive components from other books was that they were continuing to happen, they weren’t in the past. This is no fault to Sarah Dessen, her writing was amazing and for the first 130 pages I was sure j would rate the book 4 stars or higher. I am going to read another Sarah Dessen book to see if this is how she approaches all her books or if this one was unique. I would not recommend this book to people with OCD or people who are severely triggered by mentions abusive relationships and abusive descriptions, like myself.

I cannot find a single good thing to say about this. That's how bad it was.
This is by far my least favorite Sarah Dessen book. She talks about a very serious theme that must be portrayed and discussed, specially by YA books. However, she took the easy way out and the main character's voice falls flat and the whole situation is so badly written and annoying that I was counting the pages until it was over.

Before this book, I'd only read one other book by Sarah Dessen--Lock and Key. And while it was a pretty decent read, I wasn't sure what the whole fuss over Sarah Dessen was about. And now I totes do!



I didn't really know much about the novel before reading it...besides for it involving dating abuse. And I kind of love 'issue' novels, so this one sounded right up my alley. And it was!



The story starts off with the the MC Caitlin's sister Cass running away on her (Caitlin's) sixteenth birthday. Cass had been a bit of an overachiever, overshadowing Caitlin without ever meaning to, even though both sister's were best friends. Her sudden departure leaves her family shocked, who'd never have expected her to be so rash and reckless.



So we get that Caitlin feels as if her family could do without her, the one who was always just...there. And that's when she meets Rogerson, a mysterious yet freakin'-hot dude with whom she can shed her 'always-on-the-safe-side' persona.



The narration was absolutely beautiful--stunning in its simplicity. As dark as the subject matter is, there are some uplifting moments too, specifically at the end. And the dark stuff was handled brilliantly, too--it had me rooting for Caitlin, understanding why she kept up with Rogerson's abuse, while at the same time crying along with her when things got really rough.



Basically, I understand now why Sarah Dessen's so awesome--her stories have a way of falling together near the end and creating such a beautiful impact on you. I am so reading the rest of her books, which I was going to do anyway, but will do so now with more eagerness.

Dessen has finally written a book I don't like. Dessen is a good writer, but I just couldn't get into a book in which the main character is little more than a cardboard cutout who is attracted to a guy who is disrespectful of her from the get-go and then repeatedly beats her. I think it's good Dessen chose to address the issue of relationship abuse, I just don't care to read about it in the manner in which it was addressed, which was as milquetoast and directionless as her main character. What I like about Dessen's books is that her main characters tend to be fairly strong young women who just need to figure out a few things. Not so, young Caitlin, who spends Dreamland merely drifting through her life in whatever direction she's last been pushed, a victim of other people's whims and advances (ugh).

SPOILERS FOLLOW. NOTHING ANYONE WITH BRAINS CAN'T PREDICT, BUT STILL: YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Dessen squandered her opportunities with the book by failing to fully develop Rogerson and Caitlin's relationship with him into something more three-dimensional - there's really nothing realistic about those characterizations to explain why Caitlin would continually go back to a boy she knew would continue to beat her - in real life, the kinds of men who batter women are generally extremely manipulative, but there was none of that seduction in Dreamland. It's a shame, because it would have made for a much more compelling read, and better demonstrate to Dessen's inexperienced readers what to be aware of in real life. It's much harder to leave someone you love who turns into a batterer, but there was never any reason for me to believe Caitlin would love Rogerson; he was rude & dismissive of her from the start, with no compelling or redeeming qualities, and the good-girl-bad-boy trope is so freaking TIRED. I expect more of Dessen. I also found the novel's resolution to be weak. Usually I appreciate how Dessen wraps things up at the end of each novel, but this time around, the story ended with the main character still pretty shaky, imo. If the story were a non-fictional account, I'd place $100 on Caitlin getting back together with Rogerson within weeks. Maybe Dessen left that ambiguity in on purpose, but it did not feel like a conscious decision on her part, and it does not square with her usual pattern of resolution and character development. It felt unresolved, like Dessen herself was drifting. I also wanted to know what happened to Rogerson (prison, community service, what?) and how Caitlin felt about it by the end, and I found it impossible to believe that Caitlin would not ferret out that information. Too many loose ends (there's a subplot as well), too much ambiguity, and weak characters just made this an unenjoyable read for me. Given the subject matter and Dessen's popularity as a teen writer, I really wish she'd at least made Caitlin stronger by the end of it all, but I just don't see that she did.

As an aside/final note, any young ladies who will assume from my review that I don't understand abuse can keep that sage opinion to themselves. I have experienced abuse both at home and in relationships. Do not assume that because I find Dessen's story faulty/unenjoyable, I "don't know what it's like." I grok that crap on a cellular level, and anyone who leaps at me over that issue will find her comments deleted.

(Rating revised down from 2 to 1 star on Jan. 16, 2014.)