The Nightmare Affair by Mindee Arnett

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.

Source:  egalley via Tor Teen/Netgalley

Bonus:  2013 Debut Author Challenge

Story Breakdown:

Dusty is a Nightmare and feeds off the dreams of others.  After The Will pulls her to Eli’s house to feed she sees the murder of a student at her school for magical kind, Arkwell Academy.  It’s this dream that reveals Dusty isn’t just an ordinary Nightmare, she’s a dream seer and Eli is her partner.  He is transferred to her school so that they can work together to try to interpret his dreams to find out more information on the killer so that they can be stopped.

Character Highlights:

Dusty – I liked her but I didn’t love her.  She had a case of typical teenager syndrome and kept most information to herself, made assumptions a bit too often, and immediately trusted the first boy who paid her any attention with sensitive information to her investigation.  I would have liked her to have been a bit more confident but I definitely saw her going in the right direction towards the end and look forward to reading more about her in the next book.

Eli – Again, at first he wasn’t my favorite.  I think the second half of the book really brought out both characters to me and I started to connect more with them as well as the story.  Being as they are partners in the dream seer world I think I would have liked a bit of the books to be in his POV.

Overall Thoughts:

This was a much more light-hearted and snarky read then I thought it would be.  I made the assumption based on the blurb on goodreads and the cover that this story was darker but it came off more like a Hex Hall meets Harry Potter which was a nice surprise.  I think any fans of HH or magic related stories will enjoy this book.

3.75/5