“Just like the big bad wolf.”
As she blows out the candles on her thirtieth birthday cake in the opening of Lucid, Charlie Marin reveals herself to be the antagonistic force driving Jenna Boholij’s literary thriller.
Charlie has a successful job, compassionate family and friends, and a boyfriend in Winnipeg, but she cannot move past the death of her twin Cara, who died at age thirteen. The details of how she died are hidden away, but this loss makes Charlie numb to her circumstances and all possibilities for her future.
To this point, Charlie has coped with this grief by reliving and recreating her past. Having discovered years earlier that she can reconnect with Cara temporarily when she succumbs to secret, violent impulses, she becomes increasingly desperate to reunite with her. All the while, she finds herself revisiting a lucid dream she first had after Cara’s death. With this milestone birthday as the catalyst, Charlie begins to excavate the darkest parts of her mind to understand what this dream is signaling to her before her life breaks apart.
In her dream, Charlie is in bed in a bright, sparsely decorated white room, near a framed family photo on a bedside table that she examines for a moment before a piercing scream engulfs the room and wakes her up. She interprets this dreamscape, where she is aware it is a dream but cannot change its course, as a manifestation of her compounding stress as her choices become harder to hide and real consequences loom. Recurring right after moments of violence or heightened stress, the dream pulls the reader away from Charlie’s recounting of her upbringing and its impact on her adult life. It is a static purgatory that exists outside the confines of the story’s timeline, signifying what Charlie cannot move past and provides clues to determine what truly happened all those years ago.
The sensitive and intricate dynamics Boholij crafts between Charlie and her older sister, Magnolia, and her parents stand out resolutely throughout this narrative. Despite the passivity with which Charlie navigates her other relationships, those with her family provide glimmers of her humanity. Equally evocative are Boholij’s descriptions of rural Manitoba, where Charlie was raised. Moody lakes that change hues with the temperature, starry nights and northern lights, and remote forests harboring dangerous animals ultimately bind her to Cara:
“In the dead of a Western Canadian winter your frozen brain can barely recall what warmth even feels like […] The prairies become a brilliant, blank, white canvas and the wind whips the snow across the roads in mesmerizing swirls. I often daydream about moving somewhere hot, like San Diego. But a daydream is all it will ever be. I could never leave Cara.”
As Charlie’s behaviors become more erratic, the dream returns with intensity, and she finally stumbles over the line of dream and reality. When the truth is illuminated in the final pages of Lucid, the purpose of several side characters falls away while the roles of others line up perfectly with the electric conclusion, but other gaps in the fabric of the story feel more intentional and amplify themes of delusion and uncertainty.
Jenna Boholij’s debut novel does not excuse the darkness underlying Charlie’s every motive and decision. It delves into the mechanics of her disturbed psyche and latches onto the curiosities that compel readers when presented with a starkly apathetic leading character who has backed herself into a corner. Instead of expecting concrete reasons for the destruction and unsettling ending, readers must flip back through the book in hopes of gathering more insight in the same cyclical manner as Lucid’s narrator.
Jenna Boholij grew up in a small town in North-Western Ontario, on the shores of Lake Superior, and spent her summers in a small town in rural Manitoba, on the shores of Lake Winnipeg. She currently lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She is a published writer with more than a decade of experience in marketing and communications. She is of Ukrainian and Icelandic descent and very involved with the Icelandic-Canadian community. Her debut novel, a psychological thriller, Lucid, is published with Dreamsphere Books.
Publisher: Dreamsphere Books (May 20, 2024)
Paperback 8″ x 5.25″ | 294 pages
ISBN: 9781998055418
Hannah Briggs (she/her) is a writer and reader settled on Treaty 6 land in London, Ontario. Themes of social justice and equity, mental wellness, and queer identities and relationships motivate her most deeply. She enjoys reading by the water, people-watching at the market, and being a "guncle" to her roommates’ mischievous cats.
