Review: Girl of Nightmares by Kendare Blake

This book is the second book in the Anna Dressed in Blood duology. It follows Cas in the months after Anna has disappeared, taking the Obeahman with her into Hell. Cas can’t stop thinking about Anna and soon he starts seeing her appear when he least expects it. Something seems wrong and Cas decides to find out where Anna is and why she seems to be trying to contact him from the other side. This leads to ghost hunting, portals and secret societies until everything is revealed and Cas must decide if he wants to sacrifice possibly everything in order to save Anna. 



I really liked this book, and even though it has been a long time since I read the first one there were only a few times when I felt like I was missing something. But the book quickly caught me up and I didn’t feel like it took away from the reading experience of this book too much. 


As in a lot of YA I feel like I would have liked basically everything to have been explored a bit more. I would love to know more about Thomas’ powers, his and Carmels’ relationship, the cult, Gideon’s history, the history of the Obeahman…basically everything. I feel like that with a lot of YA and I think it’s because publishers like to keep YA short and sweet (the huge font often making it even shorter). I feel like they don’t trust their audience to be able to focus on longer, more slowly developed plots, and frankly I find that insulting. A lot of YA authors are great writers and I do think they could expand their stories to be just a bit wider in scope if they wanted to/were allowed to. This is just my unfounded opinion and I have no idea if there is any truth to it, as I don’t know what goes on behind the doors of the publishing houses. I just know that I often found myself wanting just a little bit more after finishing a YA book. 

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