Amy's View: The Nightmare Affair by Mindee Arnett

The Nightmare Affair by Mindee Arnett
♦publisher: Tor Teen
♦release date: March 5th, 2013
♦hardcover, 367 pages
♦intended audience: Young adult
♦series: The Arkwell Academy, book #1
♦source: from publisher for honest review

Sixteen-year-old Dusty Everhart breaks into houses late at night, but not because she’s a criminal. No, she’s a Nightmare.

Literally.

Being the only Nightmare at Arkwell Academy, a boarding school for magickind, and living in the shadow of her mother’s infamy, is hard enough. But when Dusty sneaks into Eli Booker’s house, things get a whole lot more complicated. He’s hot, which means sitting on his chest and invading his dreams couldn’t get much more embarrassing. But it does. Eli is dreaming of a murder.

Then Eli’s dream comes true.

Now Dusty has to follow the clues—both within Eli’s dreams and out of them—to stop the killer before more people turn up dead. And before the killer learns what she’s up to and marks her as the next target.

Review: A sweet whimsical ride of nightmare proportions. This book is a light hearted read that spins you on a magical chase.

Dusty is a nightmare. Literally! Born of half human and half nightmare, Dusty lives the life as an outcast. Not completely human and able to live among humans and not all demon, which isn’t the hierarchy of magic kind anyways. Dusty remains trapped in the in between of not quite fitting in.

Being new to the magical world and unaccepted by her peers, life at Arkwell Academy boarding school for magic kind, is worse than any nightmare. If not having a place to fit in at a boarding school is bad enough, dream feeding on humans is enough to completely mortify her.  Breaking and entering, wearing all black and sitting on a boy’s chest’s to invade his dreams, is killing her chance to ever fit in. Not to mention her lack of learning spells, causing mere accidents of singing hair and turning the most popular girl into a snake. 

Being a nightmare is all drawbacks. From needing to feed on dreams to survive to living in the shadows of her mother, the most notorious evil nightmare alive. Just when she thinks she might be figuring out how to be a nightmare everything goes terribly wrong. All Dusty had to do was climb in the window of handsome and totally sexy human boy, sit on his chest and invade his dreams. When that boy turns out to be Eli, a boy she knows, Dusty’s life takes a drastic turn for the worse. When he wakes up to find her sitting on his chest in the middle of the night, all she wants to do is die from embarrassment.  That however isn’t the most disturbing part. Eli was dreaming of a murder at Arkwell Academy, a place no human knows about.  Spinning Dusty’s world into a tailspin, as she is forced to team up with Eli as a dream-seer pair and use her dream invading skills to solve the murder.  

This books dabbles in all types of magical beings giving them new meaning and life, from fairies to sirens, to hags and demons. All set up in their own classes and social structures. While the story was fun and easy it was also heavy laden with many characters, leaving the plot to drag on at times.

If you loved the Harry Potters series this story weaves a tale that is similar to its likeness. A great stepping stone into the world of young adult books, appropriate for younger readers while being entertaining for older readers alike.

Find Mindee Arnett online: Website  •  Twitter  •  Facebook

Purchase The Nightmare Affair:  Amazon  •  BN.com  •  Book Depository  •  Indiebound