Book Review: Nightstrider

I received this book for free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

When a vicious night terror lords over the waking world and the dream world, his greatest weapon, a winged assassin born of a nightmare, will have her vengeance.

Wren has spent her life doing the bidding of her cruel creator Para Warwick in the dream world known as the Reverie. When she learns of a weapon with the power to destroy him, she jumps at the chance to steal it. Her plan goes awry and she finds herself in the clutches of the rebellion and the rogue Alaric, a nightmare himself with twisted horns and dark magic. When a plea from a strange being known as a dreambreaker reaches them, the two ’mares find themselves thrown together in a desperate mission to save her before time runs out.

Meanwhile, in the waking world, Caine Fallon, son of King Warwick and Prince of Wolfhelm, prepares to wed Ila Enevoldson, the young queen from the wild kingdom of Galesborough. But Ila is more than a queen. She is a weaver, a protector of the ancient Boundary that separates the Reverie and the Wake. Three nights before their wedding, Caine catches Ila in the act of opening a portal to the dream world and follows her, landing himself in a universe stranger than he could have imagined—a realm where his father is more monstrous than he ever could have fathomed.

Now, the fates of four strangers will become intricately entwined, and the fate of their worlds will be sewn by their choices.

Why is the author making us wait this long for the 2^nd book to come out? I want to jump right into it after finishing Nightstrider because I don’t want to break that feeling about being so hyped up about our beloved characters finally smoking the peace pipe (albeit temporarily) and uniting to bring down the accursed conqueror of both the Wake and the Reverie.

While it’s not the best among the epic fantasies that littered the genre today, Nighstrider brought a lot of yummy goodness to the table. As one of our characters always say, this book is real sumptuous dish. Slade is one good chef who knows the recipe like it’s the back of her hand because I ate this book with as much gusto as I have from beginning to end.

For one, the magical system alone was fascinating and intricate but does not take a lot of mental gymnastics to grasp. We have weavers who can open and close the doors beyond this plane leading into the dream world, and vice versa. There are also the good and bad dreams transforming into something that is real and sentient. The lore that Slade created to make the story more cohesive and poignant is just a testament that the author really knows what she’s doing with this book. We have our main and supporting characters who are both adorable and badasses in their own little way. I even found myself admiring the villain because he’s just so despicable and power hungry that it’s almost endearing. Hahaha. And who would not want to explore the worlds that Sophia has created in the Nightstrider? It’s dark but there’s a certain grandiose to all of it that it’s hard to suppress the wanderlust in you. And the friendship between our characters, both main and supporting, are quirky and fun that you just want to tell them to go do group hugs together and prank each other.

I think the only pitfall of Nightstrider to be a truly truly epic fantasy was that it has a lot of focus on the romantic relationships between our characters. While the main plot still moved forward chapter by chapter, I think toning down the romance between our main leads would help it a lot as we are dealing with adult characters who should be matured enough not to be swooning or gawking or behaving like high school boys or girls at how gorgeous the other one is. The story telling is already wonderful and palatable so the author need not overdo it with all those thoughts of how beautiful, how muscular, how throat drying our characters are.

But all in all, this is a fantastic book to start off the series and I hope that Slade still has a lot of tricks up her sleeve to entertain us more in the succeeding books.