Girl of Nightmares by Kendare Blake

Title: Girl of Nightmares
Author: Kendare Blake
Blurb:
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.

Links:
Girl of Nightmares on Goodreads
 
 Kala's Review:
I love this series! Girl of Nightmares was a perfect followup to Anna Dressed in Blood. Sequels often fail to match the hype of the original, but I have to say this one came pretty damn close.

While I liked Girl of Nightmares, it didn't hook me nearly as much as the first. I found myself skimming occasionally and I think that's partially because outside of a few quick visions, Anna was mostly absent in this book. The majority of Girl of Nightmares is Cas trying to get to Anna once he finds out she's in Hell (or what she thinks is Hell).

When I started this series, I was a little weirded out by the ghost/human love story, but it totally made sense. I was also nervous about how Blake would end it, but she blew it away. I won't spoil it, but the ending was perfect, absolutely perfect.

Parts of Girl of Nightmares bored me, as Cas spends a lot of time traveling around. A new character (Jestine) was introduced, and I didn't connect with her as much as with the other side characters. Outside of these minor issues, the book was great.

Definitely will be checking out more from this author in the future!
 
4 out of 5 stars.

Link to Kala's review on Goodreads:
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/387662377

The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater

Title: The Raven Boys
Author: Maggie Stiefvater
Blurb:
"There are only two reasons a non-seer would see a spirit on St. Mark’s Eve,” Neeve said. “Either you’re his true love . . . or you killed him.”

It is freezing in the churchyard, even before the dead arrive.

Every year, Blue Sargent stands next to her clairvoyant mother as the soon-to-be dead walk past. Blue herself never sees them—not until this year, when a boy emerges from the dark and speaks directly to her.

His name is Gansey, and Blue soon discovers that he is a rich student at Aglionby, the local private school. Blue has a policy of staying away from Aglionby boys. Known as Raven Boys, they can only mean trouble.

But Blue is drawn to Gansey, in a way she can’t entirely explain. He has it all—family money, good looks, devoted friends—but he’s looking for much more than that. He is on a quest that has encompassed three other Raven Boys: Adam, the scholarship student who resents all the privilege around him; Ronan, the fierce soul who ranges from anger to despair; and Noah, the taciturn watcher of the four, who notices many things but says very little.

For as long as she can remember, Blue has been warned that she will cause her true love to die. She never thought this would be a problem. But now, as her life becomes caught up in the strange and sinister world of the Raven Boys, she’s not so sure anymore.

From Maggie Stiefvater, the bestselling and acclaimed author of the Shiver trilogy and The Scorpio Races, comes a spellbinding new series where the inevitability of death and the nature of love lead us to a place we’ve never been before.

Links:
The Raven Boys on Goodreads

The Raven Boys on Amazon

Maggie Stiefvater's Website

 Kala's Review:

Thank you to Scholastic for providing me a copy of this book via netgalley.com.  :)

The very beginning of this book and the very end of this book are phenominal. Unfortunately, the middle is dreadfully boring and confusing to the point where I seriously struggled to get through nearly 200 pages of this novel.

I loved Scorpio Races and thought Shiver was okay. The blurb of this book excited me as well, and I couldn't wait to read another Stiefvater book. Then I opened it up and got even more excited. Blue and Gansey were both fascinating and I couldn't wait to see how they end up meeting up, and what happens from there...

But after that meetup, the story just collapsed for me. I found Adam kind of boring and I don't see someone as eccentric as Blue falling for someone that boring. He is sweet and nice, but I felt myself skimming the pages where he and Blue were interacting because it was all so boring. I also thought Adam was kind of a jerk to Gansey, considering Gansey seemed to want nothing more than to help him. I get that he was prideful, but Gansey obviously had good intentions and Adam treated him pretty badly (especially towards the end after the big confrontation).

Gansey was far more interesting at the start, but he even fell a little flat for me in the middle. He was so focused on the quest, and I was hoping to see more interaction between him and Blue. We get this amazing setup in the first few chapters, with Blue seeing his dead spirit on St. Mark's Eve, and the prediction of Blue kissing her true love and killing him... then he and Blue barely interact. The only time I saw any chemistry between them were the "visions" that Blue had a few times of them. Their actual interactions were boring.

The last couple of chapters picked up again, but at the end I was left feeling somewhat cheated. I can't say there was no plot, because a lot of things happened, but they weren't what I was expecting and they definitely weren't better than I was expecting. I wasn't emotionally attached to Noah, or Barrington, or Neeve, or any of the characters who played such a huge role at the end of this book.

That said, this book wasn't awful. I just didn't love it. I will probably continue the series, as I'm interested to see how things work out for Blue and Gansey.

3 out of 5 stars.

Link to Kala's review on Goodreads:
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/419788782

Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake

Title: Anna Dressed in Blood
Author: Kendare Blake
Blurb:

Just your average boy-meets-girl, girl-kills-people story...

Cas Lowood has inherited an unusual vocation: He kills the dead.

So did his father before him, until his gruesome murder by a ghost he sought to kill. Now, armed with his father’s mysterious and deadly athame, Cas travels the country with his kitchen-witch mother and their spirit-sniffing cat. Together they follow legends and local lore, trying to keep up with the murderous dead—keeping pesky things like the future and friends at bay.

When they arrive in a new town in search of a ghost the locals call Anna Dressed in Blood, Cas doesn’t expect anything outside of the ordinary: move, hunt, kill. What he finds instead is a girl entangled in curses and rage, a ghost like he’s never faced before. She still wears the dress she wore on the day of her brutal murder in 1958: once white, but now stained red and dripping blood. Since her death, Anna has killed any and every person who has dared to step into the deserted Victorian she used to call home.

And she, for whatever reason, spares his life.

Links:
Anna Dressed in Blood on Goodreads

Anna Dressed in Blood on Amazon

Kendare Blake's Website

 Kala's Review:

She turns to me. "We're in on the secret now, aren't we Cas? And it's taking us out of the world."

"That's usually the way it works," I say softly.

When I first started reading this book I was a bit apprehensive about it. I don't mind ghost stories, but I had a hard time wrapping my mind around ghosts that are tangible and 'killable' I suppose. I get the idea of banishment and spells, but stabbing with a knife? It was weird, at first.

But then I got sucked in to this story and it all made sense.

Cas is a teenage boy and this book is told from his point of view. He has inherited the job of killing murderous ghosts after his father was killed by a particularly nasty one. He and his quirky pagan/white witch mother travel around the country seeking out ghosts.

His journeys land him in Thunder Bay (Canada) where he finds out about a ghost named Anna, who was killed while wearing a white dress. The dress is now bathed in her blood which earned her the nickname Anna Dressed in Blood. Anna haunts her old house and murders everyone who enters.

Until Cas.

For some reason she doesn't kill him.


"Go," she orders, queen of her dead castle. "I don't want to kill you. And it seems that I don't have to, for some reason. So go."

Cas sets out to find out the story of Anna, and that's where this book truly shines. Along the way he meets up with a few new friends (classmates from his school) who are both interesting and fun and not the stereotypical cliche friends we get in every YA novel.

Carmel is the preppy cheerleader/popular girl/prom queen, but she's so much more than that. I'm so glad that Blake didn't turn her in to a Cordelia (from Buffy) and made Carmel a smart and funny person as well as being the popular girl. I'm looking forward to seeing more of Carmel in the sequel!

I'm not going to say anything more about the plot, because I don't want to ruin anything, but the story is just beautifully told and fun to read. It's scary, but not overly so. It's romantic, but not to the point of being sappy. The words are just not coming to me! I'll say this... it's unique. And I mean that in the good way!

Every time I open a new book I'm always hoping it will be amazing. I always want to read that next amazing book that leaves me thinking about it long after I've finished. The kind that I want to re-read as soon as I finish it. And again a few days later. And again the next week.

This is one of those books.

In a genre so full of the same cliche tropes over and over, this book truly stands out as that special something.

5 of 5 stars.


Link to Kala's review on Goodreads:
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/387672921