Audiobook Review-Girl of Nightmares by Kendare Blake

Title: Girl of Nightmares

 Author: Kendare Blake

Series:   Anna #2

Narrator: August Ross

Published:  7 March 2013 by Orchard, 16 October 2012 by Audiogo

Length: 10hrs 4mins, 384 pages

Warnings: graphic gore

Source: audiobook publishers

Other info: I really loved book one in the series, Anna Dressed in Blood. Kendare has also written Antigoddess.

Summary : Cas Lowood is no ordinary ghost hunter - he's in love with a dead girl. Her name is Anna Korlov. Anna Dressed in Blood. The girl who sacrificed herself to save his life. Racked with guilt, Cas sets out to do what he does best - hunt a ghost. But this time his aim is not to kill. He must rescue Anna from the depths of Hell. But Hell is also home to a creature Cas has battled before...Just your average boy meets girl, girls gets sucked into hell story.

Review: Remember Anna Dressed in Blood? Well,  *SPOILER FOR DRESSED IN BLOOD* she’s in a realm with the Obemann. Cas gets haunted by the ghost of his ghost girlfriend. With the help of Thomas and Carmel  and a new girl, Jestine , he gets information about Anna from the Order and tries to find her, before she suffers a fate worse than death.

I really liked Anna Dressed in Blood. Gory, great characters, ghost hunting and fun. I was  looking forwards to this one.

I don’t normally listen to actual audiobooks read by a person (I normally just let kindle text-to-speech read aloud to me on walks). When I started this, I listened to the narrator’s voice and just thought “8 hours with this guy. Damn. His voice is annoying”. It grew on me after a bit, but it isn’t the way I imagined Cas to sound.

There’s a distinct lack of Anna, despite the fact that she’s in Hell. For a series named after her, you’d expect to see a bit more of her, and I hoped there’d be a bit more because she’s really really cool. She was very save-me when she was here, not quite as...Anna as she was in Dressed in Blood. I also missed the focus on ghost hunting.

Cas wallows in pity about the lack of Anna a lot in this one. It gets  a little annoying. Thomas and Carmel add a bit more realisticness, and add a bit of depth. Jury’s out on Jestine-to start with, she’s a bit unlikable, but I think you warm up to her in time. I liked seeing more of Thomas.

It did the creepy thing a bit better in this one. There’s a scene where the team are  going through a forest with a lot of bodies of those who have commited suicide. DON’T TURN YOUR BACK DON’T LOOK AWAY DON’T BLINK GOOD LUCK.  Quantum locked corpses chasing teens through a forest. Fun times.  (Ok, they’re not officially quantum locked, but that’s the vibe I got from them)

The climax added to the intensity, with powerful forces at play and a lot at stake here.

The resolution, I have mixed feelings about. From an in-book, plotty way, it’s perfect-it concludes nicely but not in a particularly good way, reflecting that sometimes things don’t turn out the way you expect.  From a reader’s point of view,it’s all “no why did you do that???”

Overall: Strength 2.5, more a  3 tea to a disappointing end to a a duology that I loved the first part to.

Links: Amazon | Goodreads | Author website | 

Book Review- Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake

Title: Anna Dressed in Blood

 Author: Kendare Blake

Series:   Anna #1

Published:  5 July 2012

Length: 384 pages

Warnings: sex references, a lot of gore, black magic & voodoo 13+

Source: Hachette and Tor both sent me a copy for review. Thank you!

Other info: Kendare also wrote Sleepwalk Society. Book two will be called Girl of Nightmares. Kendare has a book coming some other day called AntiGoddess.

Summary : 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

Review: Cas kills the dead. He’s been doing it ever since his dad was killed doing the same job ten years ago, and hopes that one day, he will avenge his father. Anna kills the living. She’s been doing it ever since she was murdered in 1958, her throat slit from ear to ear, and she hopes that...er, not much. She just keeps killing. So when Cas and Anna meet, something stops her from killing him. And as they uncover reasons why that is, coming with it is ghosts from the past for both of them.

I really loved the idea. From the one line summary (Boy meets girl, girl kills people), I was drawn in and really wanted to read it as soon as I could. And the proof copy from Hachette came with awesomeness on the cover from many other bloggers.

So, from the start I was drawn in. It starts with a snapshot of Cas’ job, so he kills a hitchhiker. That was already dead, before you start worrying. We soon see him move to Ontario, join the school, fit in easily with those at the top of the social ladder. And then he meets Anna.

It’s not the ideal first meeting. He’s been knocked out by a plank of wood being smashed down on his head and he’s lying on the bottom of the stairs. Everything in this scene, and pretty much throughout, was really well described, and I could really see it all happening.

This book is definitely n the whole film-format. Action start, then back to normal, then building and building. I can see this being made a film. But it meant that I could not stop reading this. Apart from when I had to because actual life got in the way, but I got back to it soon enough. This is one of those books that makes you feel like you have to read on to see how it will go, because there’s always something happening that makes you think.

Cas and Anna are both really good protagonists in their own ways. Cas was not your normal protagonist at all, and I really liked his narration style. I really wasn’t sure what to make of Anna to start with, but as we learn more and more about her, I just fell in love with her and felt bad for her. Her past especially was interesting.

The whole idea of ghosts on a large scale, not just a few isolated ones, killing people was really interesting. The lore surrounding the ghosts was easy to pick up on, and I liked the way that Kendare brought in other, less mainstream, religions like Wicca and Voodoo, and made them useful to the plot, but not in a clichéd way.

The rest of the characters were good. I was very glad about the fact that Cas didn’t end up with Carmel, and found it really cute that Thomas did.

The only thing that I had a problem with was that it wasn’t scary. Maybe I’d hyped myself up after all the amazing reviews, but while I was gripped totally, I just didn’t get  the feeling of having to leave the lights on or stay awake. But in the grand scheme of things, it didn’t take anything away. Just denied me of something that I never had. It’s still a really really good book.

Overall:  Strength 4.5 tea to a ghost story with strong characters, a lot of gore and the ability to keep your reading on and on and on and on and on and...you get the idea.. Let’s hope Girl of Nightmares is just as good.

Links: Amazon |  Goodreads | Author website |