YA, Urban Fantasy, Mythology
Characters ★★★☆☆
Setting ★★★★☆
Writing Style ★★★☆☆
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.
Initially I was excited about the concept of The Nightmare Affair but pretty nonplussed with the execution and the mundanity of the plot. And then somehow I'd read the whole book and my entire outlook had changed? How did that happen?
The Nightmare Affair tells the story of Dusty, a literal Nightmare who can enter people's dreams. Through an accident, it's revealed that she's part of a bonded Dream-Seer pair with Eli Booker, a boy whose dream she had just witnessed a murder in. Together, Eli and Dusty are tasked with predicting the killer's next moves and solving a murder.
Firstly, there's a lot more focus on school than I enjoy reading. Possibly this is because I am no longer in school, and cannot relate, or because I don't really care for lingering over the whole school thing. But classes and social hierachy and weird teachers aside, The Nightmare Affair is a fun and original story.
I loved the development of relationship between Dusty and Eli, the obvious villainousness of certain people (Dusty, how can you not see he's evil??), and the mechanics of magic and the whole world that encompasses it. The whole Nightmare thing was awesome, for one thing. And the weaving of Arthurian legend? I both saw and didn't see it coming. (the Nimue surname was a giant flashing exclamation mark, but it could have meant nothing.)
To say I started off not really fussed with this book, I ended up enjoying it.
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