Hello, again, all you YA Lit readers out in the stratosphere! My grad school classes temporarily lightened enough for me to (finally) finish one of the books I’ve been reading: Girl of Nightmares by Kendare Blake, sequel to the super chilling Anna Dressed in Blood.
I finished it earlier today, but there are still so many questions and unresolved issues swirling around about this!
First, is this really the ending to the Anna saga??? I left it feeling like Cas, our ghost-fighter/wooer extraordinaire, was simply on his way to continue fighting ghosts, as soon as he was feeling a bit better. And especially with the introduction of Jestine, another ghost fighter who apparently is about to get her own athame, it seemed as though Ms. Blake was setting them up for some kind of romance/showdown of ghost-hunting skills or something.
But I suppose that the question itself is actually beside the point. After reading Anna Dressed in Blood (obsessedly absorbed by micro-book light, on my Kindle, on a trip through India, while my fiance was trying to sleep), I was hooked! And while neither Ms. Blake nor Anna are quite at Stephen King levels, in Anna, Ms. Blake does seem several steps ahead of most other writers in creating interesting dynamics and character development that cleanly weaves together a page-turning plot with thrills and chills. And while my memory’s not serving me perfectly on all the details of Anna, what I remember most from it was the atmosphere: creepy, gruesome ghost monsters, waiting to rip at flesh and trip up Cas as he sends them to wherever they were meant to go.
The first Anna hooked me, big time: ghosts, ghosts, and more ghosts!–plus interesting high schooler dynamics, a ghost hunter, his witch-y best friend, and a generally great ensemble cast working to eradicate ghostly ne’er do wells from the realm of the living.
This time around, Girl of Nightmares had a notably less exciting feel. Don’t get me wrong–there’s still ghosts all over, there’s still a pretty epic showdown at the end, there’s still amusing high school drama antics interspersed throughout, but I found myself (and I hate to say this) actually bored at several points throughout. As in, my eyes were moving over words, but I didn’t really find myself committing to the meaning of them enough to take anything away with them. Also, Cas got all mopey-emo since the first book.
Girl of Nightmares is dark, but it’s a responsive dark: the response of Cas realizing that his “girlfriend” Anna (yes, I’d like to know when that happened, too) has succeeded in dragging the horrible Obeahman to hell, but is stuck there herself now, facing an eternity of being tortured over and over by him. Cas, still in the land of the living, pines and mopes and acts heartsick, but quickly realizes he can’t–that, indeed, he won’t–move on, as he’s convinced Anna’s being tortured and is in pain because of her sacrifice.
Noble? Yes. And if the solution was somewhat easily found and the journey to rescue her the true focus of the story, then it would be page-turning, too. And dark and gruesome, in the same vain as the first Anna. Unfortunately, instead we end up with a book about how Cas learns that Carmel doesn’t want to hunt ghosts, that his athame came from a very old group of people who have athames that look like his athame, that his mother doesn’t approve, that Morfran’s dog likes peanut butter cookies, etc, etc. Not to say that character development and twists to the plot aren’t important, but just to say that there could be a little more excitement prior to the last, oh, four chapters or so. And that there may be more exciting ways to present character development also.
By the end, I found myself feeling very meh. The ending feels more beginning-ish than actually ending-ish, and along the way there really isn’t any clear suggestion as to what, exactly Cas’s end game is. Rescue Anna from hell and then what? Drag her back over the ocean from England (where he enters) to the US? To a house that no longer exists? Or is he going to stay in hell with her? Or hope that both of them are sent to heaven? Even Cas admits that he doesn’t know what he’s going to do, but he feels he can’t just leave her. Which is understandable, considering her sacrifice, but still does not make for the most exciting read.
By the end, Anna (we think?) has been freed from the Obeahman’s control, as have others. Cas is still alive, his friends and mother still support him, and the athame is still his. He’s risked the lives of basically everyone he knows, but the ghost (already dead) has been saved. There just still seem to be so many unanswered questions swirling about.
Over all, this book was ok, but I assume it must be book two of a trilogy. I can’t imagine the author leaving these characters dangling the way they are, with so many loose ends. I’m not sure where she’s going to take it, but until we know for sure whether there’s another piece of this puzzle, there are likely better options out there to pick up. Like Anna Dressed in Blood–a really, really good scary book!
The Alpha and the Omega: The Endless Ramblings of a YA Lit Lover 