The Nightmare Affair - Mindee Arnett [Review]

Title: The Nightmare Affair

Author: Mindee Arnett

Genre: Fiction, Young Adult, Fantasy

Publisher:  Tor Teen

Publishing date:  March 5th 2013

Pages:   367

Rating

★★★★☆

Hello! Today I’m reviewing The Nightmare Affair by Mindee Arnett, the first book in The Arkwell Academy trilogy.

This book follows the story of Dusty Everhart, a sixteen-year old that breaks into houses late at night, but not because she’s a criminal, but because she is 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.

This book is a mystery fantasy story, it mostly takes place at a boarding school which reminded me of Harry Potter. There are several fantasy creatures’ races but we don’t get much information of some of them, which I hope will change in the second and third book.

The book starts with a strong first chapter that sets the mystery and the rest of the book is about getting clues and piecing them together to find out who the murderer is and who will be the next victim and why.

Besides that there is romance and teenage drama. My favorite bits were definitely the mystery ones when they try to get information about their suspects.

I liked the characters thou I sometimes felt Dusty was annoying, which I think made her a more credible teenager character, she had a bossy and kind of “I don’t need help” type of attitude. The only thing that really bothered me was that she was kinda horny sometimes and sometimes I felt those thoughts of her were out of the place due to all that was happening. The book is in first person, so we only follow her perspective.

There is romance in this book, which I don’t usually like, but I liked it here, there is a love triangle and I actually liked the second dude better than Eli, he was nice and cute, and the romance was not the main focus in the story, which I liked. The characters were really cliché, the mean girls, the prankster, the rebel girl, Dusty was the hot girl that didn’t know she was hot, Eli was the typical hot athlete and the second love interest was the nerdy but cute boy. There was a lot of teenage high school drama.

The book ended in a very conclusive way, it works well as a standalone, so I don’t really know what will happen at all in the next books because there was no cliffhanger or anything at the end.

This is a fast paced and light fantasy read, mixed with romance and mystery, it’s really entertaining but with many teenager high school drama cliché. I recommend it to you if you are looking something light and entertaining to read.