The Nightmare Affair
Published March 5th 2013
by Tor TeenARC from Netgalley
Summary from Goodreads:
Sixteen-year-old Dusty Everhart breaks into houses late at night, but not because she’s a criminal. No, she’s a Nightmare.
Literally.
Being the only Nightmare at Arkwell Academy, a boarding school for magickind, and living in the shadow of her mother’s infamy, is hard enough. But when Dusty sneaks into Eli Booker’s house, things get a whole lot more complicated. He’s hot, which means sitting on his chest and invading his dreams couldn’t get much more embarrassing. But it does. Eli is dreaming of a murder.
Then Eli’s dream comes true.
Now Dusty has to follow the clues—both within Eli’s dreams and out of them—to stop the killer before more people turn up dead. And before the killer learns what she’s up to and marks her as the next target.
Literally.
Being the only Nightmare at Arkwell Academy, a boarding school for magickind, and living in the shadow of her mother’s infamy, is hard enough. But when Dusty sneaks into Eli Booker’s house, things get a whole lot more complicated. He’s hot, which means sitting on his chest and invading his dreams couldn’t get much more embarrassing. But it does. Eli is dreaming of a murder.
Then Eli’s dream comes true.
Now Dusty has to follow the clues—both within Eli’s dreams and out of them—to stop the killer before more people turn up dead. And before the killer learns what she’s up to and marks her as the next target.
Thoughts:
In The Nightmare Affair, Nightmare is a mythic creature who fed on fictus which is stuff on which dreams are made of. As the only Nightmare in a school for magickind called Arkwell Academy, Dusty is feared and shunned upon. It also did not help that she's the daughter of a notorious troublemaker who used to burn the school. In Dusty's world, magickind are divided into three main kinds which depends on how they get their magic. There's witchkind, naturekind and darkkind; whose power came from other living creature.
Dusty unwittingly stumbled upon a murder involving one of the popular girl in her school when she was feeding on a dream from a normal boy called Eli and both of them decided to partner up to solve the mystery.
Nightmare as mythical creature is indeed an interesting concept that I believe has never been done before. Unfortunately, the clues pointing to the culprit is easy to spot and I found the sleuthing a tad too predictable. I was wondering where was the Magical Senate who was supposed to be in charge of the magickind doing the whole time? There were werewolves as magickind local law enforcement in the beginning of the book but their parts are very limited. It seemed that Dusty and her friends are very much left in their own devices.
However, I found Dusty to be truly likeable. Her siren friend; Selene is also a colourful character which brings some sparkle to the story. It is also obvious that Dusty and Eli are attracted to each other but refused to acknowledged it and instead went out with other people for most part of the book while grudgingly working together. In the end, I enjoyed the book more because of its witty characters rather than for the less than obvious murder mystery plotline.
Verdict: 4 stars.
In my Debut Author, Fantasy & Books in a Series Reading Challenge
Available on: Amazon
No comments:
Post a Comment