Nightstrider by Sophia Slade

TL;DR: Not for me, insta-love and unrealistically ‘badass’ MC
Source: NetGalley, so many thanks to the publisher!

Plot: Four PoVs, the outline of one world, an evil king, and that’s about it.
Characters: Fairly flat and predictable, especially for the genre.
Setting: I wish there had been so much more here.
Romantasy: Insta-love, which was frustrating after a brief tease of a sapphic relationship.

Summary:

Wren is a nightmare: a deadly manifestation of the frightening dreams of humans. She is forever bound to the insidious Para Warwick, the only night creature who can cross the boundary between the dream and waking realms. When she fails to retrieve information on a weapon that could finally end Warwick’s reign and is severely punished, she makes a snap decision to aid the growing rebellion in finding it. Here, she meets Alaric, another nightmare hell-bent on atoning for his sins. Though wildly suspicious of one another, they form a tentative pact to take down Warwick once and for all.

The waking world is no better off. Prince Caine Fallon, Warwick’s ignorant human son, prepares to wed Ila Enevoldson, the young queen from a neighboring kingdom. But Ila is more than she seems: She is a weaver, a protector of the ancient Boundary that separates the realms, and she has lost a precious weapon entrusted to her. She will do anything to retrieve it, including agreeing to an engagement with the son of her sworn enemy. 

When Caine catches Ila opening a portal to the dream realm and follows her through, he finds himself in a universe stranger than he could have imagined, where his father is more monstrous than he could have fathomed. Their destinies collide with those of the two lethal nightmares, and they are forced to band together to stop the vicious dictator—and prevent the very fabric of reality from unravelling.

Thoughts:

It feels like I’m just repeating myself over and over at this point, but so many of these romantasy books have so many good ideas but fall so flat. This was unfortunately no exception to that seeming rule. A world made of dreams and nightmares, a morally gray MC and a mix of human and monstrous characters. Sadly, past the idea we get a set of paper thin characters, little to no effort on romance, and total ignorance of medical rules.

I’m not going to harp on this too much. I’ll just note some of my complaints. We’ll start with the characters, flat and familiar in the worst way. We have read these characters, and this felt genuinely like fanfiction of a certain character from a certain famous series. These characters then made some of the most ridiculous choices. Just spouting out secrets to everyone about everything. And a tiny gripe but one that had me flinching every time – the stitches. I recently had my first stitches. Ripping those? No. Absolutely not.

The world was a skeleton, it needed a lot of detail and work and would have been great. But we were missing so much. In addition the writing was rough. This was supposed to be adult, but it genuinely felt like it was originally written as YA then aged up (in a lazy way). They added language, rape, and language and said “It’s adult”. Yikes.

But we were missing so much. Overall I can’t say I recommend it? I’m sure there are readers for this but it isn’t me.