REVIEW: Girl of Nightmares (book) by Kendare Blake

Girl of Nightmares is the second book in Kendare Blake's Anna duology. It's YA horror/paranormal fiction. I got my copy via interlibrary loan.

This review includes slight spoilers.

Review:

Anna is gone and Cas can't bring himself to move on. She was a ghost when he met her, and he was not only a living person, but also a ghost hunter - there was never any future for the two of them. But that doesn't stop him from thinking about her and missing her.

However, it seems like Anna might not entirely be gone. Cas keeps seeing and hearing her. The problem is that, wherever she is, she's being horribly tortured. Literally everyone tells Cas that he needs to forget about Anna and try to move on, but how can he when he keeps seeing her in so much agony?

I read Anna Dressed in Blood way back in 2018. I remember mostly enjoying it, but it's been long enough that my memories are fuzzy. This was a bit of a problem when I started Girl of Nightmares. It wasn't that Blake didn't provide enough info to remind readers about what happened - I was able to get back into the story fairly well. The problem was that I couldn't remember why Anna was worth all of Cas's moping, risk-taking, and general selfishness.

He almost died during a fight against a ghost because the longer he delayed ending the fight, the more opportunities he got to see and maybe hear Anna. Just about everyone in the book told him that he needed to give up on his obsession, and the only reason I didn't 100% agree with them was because Cas couldn't exactly stop the visions he kept having of Anna sitting there and getting her skin peeled off. Otherwise, though, it was frustrating how Cas seemed to view the very, very dead Anna as being of greater value than all the living people in his life.

The bulk of the book was agonizingly slow. I disliked the way Blake paired Thomas and Carmel off in the first book, and unfortunately things took a turn for the worse in this one. The way one event was handled didn't even make sense - why be so cruel and then not follow through? It didn't even feel like a very Carmel thing to do.

The last 70 pages of this, plus some of Cas's earlier Anna sightings, were the best parts of the book. Too bad it was overshadowed by all that tedious bloat. Hardly any of the great ghost moments and awesome Anna scenes that made the first book so fun, with the added annoyance of several characters who grated on my nerves (was Cas this much of a moping jerk in the first book? and ugh, Jestine's personality irked me). This could easily have been a much better 100-page novella. After slogging through this, I kind of wish I'd treated the first book as a standalone.