What is Catching Dreams about?
One September morning, Aisling McHale wakes from a particularly disorienting nightmare and discovers her dreams have a strange new habit – they bleed into reality. When she finds a necklace from her most recent nightmare inside of her New Amhurst apartment, she thinks it is a rare oddity, but when she begins to battle the enemies that once inhabited her mind, that flips a switch from simply strange to something more sinister.
An enemy in a dream is one thing, Aisling reasons, but when a doppelganger of her starts creating chaos in her hometown and hurting people she cares about, she knows she must put an end to all of it. At first, Aisling thinks she can defeat this foe by simply harnessing the power of her dreams and controlling their outcomes. But eventually, she realizes too much damage is being done, and she must find a better way to fight her biggest adversary.
Through the chaos and the fighting, Aisling sheds her hardened exterior and surrenders to the vulnerability her found family has begged her to discover. For years, Aisling had pushed aside any semblance of emotion, fearing that she would succumb to the same unknown illness that took her mother.
Each battle within her mind and in New Amhurst itself draws Aisling closer to the realization that what she had deemed “weakness” all of her life is, in fact, the very thing that could save her friends and family.
Who is Aisling McHale?
Aisling McHale is a twenty-one-year-old from the town of New Amhurst. She works as a bookseller at the bookstore her parental guardian Quinn Lovelace owns. Her best friend is Michael Cassidy who is a pastry chef at her favorite café, Bella’s Café. She is reserved and doesn’t like to share her emotions, but as the book gets underway, she begins to share more and more with her found family.
She is courageous, sweet, and introverted. She has green eyes and dark hair like her father Sean McHale. Her mother Mya passed away when Aisling was young, and her father left them when Aisling was even younger. She is fiercely independent because of this and does not like needing other people because of her fears of them letting her down.
An excerpt describing Aisling’s doppelganger
“The woman’s eyes…hypnotized Aisling. They were identical to hers: a vivid shade of green with a ring of gold surrounding the pupil. … She observed the faint scar above the woman’s eyebrow. Out of instinct, she touched the same spot on her temple. She rubbed it gingerly as she recalled falling off a swing when she was four-years-old. The shadowy memory of Dr. Paradise tugging her skin into place as he pulled the stitches.
But when she blinked, the thoughts evaporated.”
Isabelle Palerma 