Review: Girl of Nightmares by Kendare Blake

Book: Girl of Nightmares
Author: Kendare Blake
Series: Anna
Publication Date: August 7th, 2012
Publisher: Tor Teen
Rating: 4 Stars

It's been months since the ghost of Anna Korlov opened a door to Hell in her basement and disappeared into it, but ghost-hunter Cas Lowood can't move on.

His friends remind him that Anna sacrificed herself so that Cas could live—not walk around half dead. He knows they're right, but in Cas's eyes, no living girl he meets can compare to the dead girl he fell in love with.


Now he's seeing Anna everywhere: sometimes when he's asleep and sometimes in waking nightmares. But something is very wrong...these aren't just daydreams. Anna seems tortured, torn apart in new and ever more gruesome ways every time she appears.


Cas doesn't know what happened to Anna when she disappeared into Hell, but he knows she doesn't deserve whatever is happening to her now. Anna saved Cas more than once, and it's time for him to return the favor.

There is no eloquent way to say it, so I guess I'll just come right out and say...

HOLY CRAP THIS BOOK WAS AWESOME.

 

I was pretty ehhh after reading Anna Dressed in Blood. It didn't make that much of an impact on me, so I wasn't expecting much from this one. But WHOA did it blow my expectations out of the water.

The beginning starts off kind of slow, with Cas moping around, thinking about Anna, getting himself into life-threatening situations. Same ol', same ol'. Then there are Thomas and Carmel. I never felt that many warm, fuzzy feelings about Carmel to begin with, so she didn't really please me with her attitude. 

So I was flipping pages, all bored and stuff with my chin on my hand, and I'm leaning on my elbow thinking about school and grades and stressful things that this book is not distracting me from...

When all of a sudden...

I CARE. I care about what's happening. Cas's masculine voice stops moping and starts ass kicking again, and Thomas is wobbling around in the background like his dorky voodoo loving self, and I'm just like WHOAAA shit just got real. 

Because it does. Kendare Blake writes very well from the male perspective, not just because of the well-placed f-bomb or anything, but because Cas thinks like a teenage guy would probably think. It's perfect, and I kept finding myself admiring Blake's writing when he added a quip in an otherwise serious situation.

She also does a spectacular job with the horror aspect, and the description of hell made me shiver down to my toes. It's pretty cold over here, so that might have had something to do with it. But it was still really sharp and hot and red in my mind, so hot and red that I shivered from the image. Whereas with the last book, I was kind of like "h'okay blood and black veins everywhere cool," this time I was freaking out and picturing everything. The Suicide Forest? That is some scary shiat. Especially when the corpses started closing in, and I knew they were going to get out alive because there were still like 50 pages to go, but I didn't know. You know? 

I'm not making much sense right now. I am crippled by grief and sickening excitement, for some strange reason. Also, I'm listening to Taylor Swift.

Anyway, the ending to this was perfect. I love how there's this moral lesson woven in about letting go and just living our own lives. Sometimes, it's too much to care about others when they're doing fine. As Cas says, it's a lie, but it's a damned good one. If this book is anything, it's deliciously horrifying and unique. Kendare Blake has my eternal approval for making me do a complete 180 on my opinion towards her books (not that she cares, since she's awesome anyway).  

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