Review: Girl of Nightmares (Anna, #2)

Author: Kendare Blake
Series: Anna, #2
Published: August 7th 2012
Publisher: Tor Teen
Hardcover, 332 pages
Source: Publisher for review
Buy: The Book Depository


To say that I'd been eagerly anticipating Girl of Nightmares would be an understatement of epic proportions. Anna Dressed in Blood is one of my favorite books and I simply HAD to learn Anna's fate as soon as possible. I had unreasonably high expectations, true, but for the most part, Kendare Blake came through.

In the sixth row of the theater, in the third chair in, Anna winks at me. Or maybe she just blinks. I can't tell. She's missing half of her face

A lot of my questions were answered, and a lot of those answers surprised me. The world around Cas and Anna expanded in this second installment. I loved the things we discovered about Cas’s athame, his father’s life, The Order of Biodag Dubh and Cas’s role in it, parts of his life even he was blissfully unaware of until that point. I also adored that Blake was brave enough to take them all to London and Scotland – it was a bold move and one that certainly paid off.

If there’s one thing that bothered me in Girl of Nightmares, it was the same thing that bothered everyone else: not enough Girl of Nightmares! Anna was absent during most of this book, and her absence was acutely felt. What’s worse, Cas became mopey as a result, not even a shadow of his former self. Most of the time I wanted to shake him hard enough to make his teeth rattle, just to wake him up and get him angry, stubborn, whatever! Anything would have been better than whining and self-pity.

Compared to Anna Dressed in Blood, Girl of Nightmares is a quieter book that focuses more on introspection and character relationships. Aside from one particularly eerie scene (yes, I do mean the Suicide Forest), I didn’t find it nearly as frightening. There were fabulous moments, but I kept remembering those bodies stuck in walls in Anna, and everything paled in comparison. Yes, this book had its moments, it was creepy and gruesome at times, but it was never disturbing like Anna Dressed in Blood. Take this for example:

His skin is black as a struck match, cracked and oozing liquid metal heat, like he's covered by a cooling layer of lava. The eyes stand out bright white. I can't make out from this distance if they have corneas. God I hope they have corneas. I hate that creepy weird-eye shit.

Awesome, right? I wanted more of this, and less whining and moping around. Can you really blame me?

Carmel’s uncharacteristic behavior was also hard to accept. It wasn’t what she did that bothered me, it was that it wasn’t like her at all. Combined with Cas’s constant whining, her selfishness nearly drove me insane. Only Thomas remained unchanged, always polite, always reliable.

The ending, however, blew me away. It was better than I’d dared hope. In fact, the entire last part more than made up for a few earlier problems.
Overall, Girl of Nightmares concludes this duology in a more-than-satisfactory way.