Nightmares of Caitlin Lockyer

I really like Jason Segel, and I really wanted to like this book. It has its good points, including really important story situations: kids dealing with divorce, death in the family, mental illness, and so on. My 10 year-old son really loves it. The material was appropriate for kids that age. Get it from your library if these are good enough reasons to read it.

Unfortunately this book was hard to read due to numerous stylistic errors, things like alliteration and unintended rhyming within sentences. Two of the characters have very similar names and I kept mixing them up as I read the book aloud. On top of that, the story was rather formulaic and predictable. Even the magical premise behind the book, a portal between waking and dreaming, is something that I've seen better done elsewhere.

But hey, it's a first novel. Perhaps the sequel will be better.