Dream with Our Eyes Open

I'm going to play scholarly now, like the English major I was many years ago.

I doubt I'm really going to break any new ground here, especially given that a couple of different scholarly studies of DWJ's works have been released in the past few years. I'm also guessing that this same structure might well apply to other young adult fantasy novels. Finally, I have a nagging feeling that I once read about ideas like this in something called, I think, "The Hero's Journey." But thinking this through was useful for me when I was writing my review of her recent book The Game, because it let me pinpoint where I felt that things had gone wrong.

Most of the examples that I'm going to use are from the novels I've reread most often. They are:

• Fire and Hemlock (F&H)
• The Lives of Christopher Chant (LoCC)
• Charmed Life (CL)
• The Homeward Bounders (HB)
• Archer's Goon (AG)

These books focus on a single protagonist. Although that person may have siblings or friends as sidekicks, the story is told only from his or her POV. I'm going to add a few examples from Witch Week (WW), but that one features two alternating protagonists (Nan and Charles), which makes the arguments a little less clear in some cases.

No music, because it's the middle of the night, and we have house guests (sis-in-law and nephew). And the Young Lady is off at her "Pirates of Penzance" cast party, because this was the closing night. The party runs all night, but she hasn't socialized on this level much yet, usually it's been just one-on-one with a best friend, she's an introvert like everyone else in the family (INTJ, probably) ... I'll be picking her up soon.