Publisher: ACE
Date published. March 29th, 2011
ISBN 9780441020171
Urban Fantasy
Mass Market Paperback
Reviewed by Dawn
Obtained by Publisher
Peter Octavian used to be a vampire until he was sent to hell. Now released after a millennium there, he finds he is a powerful mage. Living in San Francisco, he feels it’s his job to make sure the paranormal evil doesn’t threaten humans. After a call from Earthwitch Keomany Shaw telling him of something evil in Hawthorne, Massachusetts, Peter finds he needs her help to defeat a growing evil.
I really wanted to enjoy this book. I really did but when I started WAKING NIGHTMARES, I was unaware it was a series book and I was utterly lost when I read it. It had a lot of telling and hardly any showing in the story. I mean how many times can you tell me the same thing, over and over again. I get it. I really did after the first two or three times. There was a slow buildup to the end fight scenes and frankly, I wasn’t impressed. Don’t get me wrong, if I had read this series from the beginning then I probably would have had a different experience with his latest book but to come into the series, like this, it left me utterly confused. I wasn’t sure about Peter or why I should care about his relationships with the secondary characters and at times it felt like I needed a score card to keep track of everyone.
There is trouble in Hawthorne when a couple of fishermen open a chest and release an evil that will destroy the world and the humans in it. It’s up to Peter along with Keomany, a recently turned vampire named Charlotte and Amber, a young girl who sees visions, to band together to defeat this growing evil or the world as they know it will perish. The trouble with a good book blurb is that you get excited about a book and you pretty much get what the story is about-action, drama and sexual tension. WAKING NIGHTMARES isn’t all that and frankly, I was deeply disappointed. The author had a great concept and the characters could have been fleshed out more, to be more than the one dimensional beings they were in this story. Otherwise it plodded along; making me put the book down repeatedly as I went to read something else.
I am thinking if I had read this series from the beginning, I might give this another try in the future. Overall, it was a long story that could have been better with a few chapters whittled down and lot more action with the main characters instead of them just popping in and waving a magic wand. WAKING NIGHTMARES didn’t touch my imagination in any way but if you enjoy this author’s work, you might want to give it a try.
This is an objective review and not an endorsement of this book.
No comments:
Post a Comment