Synopsis
Thomas Madsen can change reality with his dreams, making him a dangerous man. Unaware of how or why it happens, he desperately wants it to stop. The problem is, he’s not in control. One dreamer is born every generation with the ability to alter reality, and one hunter is born to keep reality in check. For millennia, every time a dreamer encountered a hunter, the dreamer died. Until now. Collapsing on the street, Thomas awakes to find himself in the care of Madeleine Korer, a stranger who feels all too familiar. Not knowing whether to trust or fear her, Thomas walks a thin line, trapped between alternate realities, where murder or sacrifice become his only options. In this electrifying thriller, the lines between hunter and prey blur, and reality becomes the one thing they just can’t grasp.
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Review
This book is a little out of the normal genres I read, but every now and then, I like to stretch my reading and try something different. This book is a combination of fantasy with the supernatural and maybe a smidge dystopian.
It took me a little bit to wrap my head around the characters and their roles in this story, only because of the genre. Thomas is a dreamer, Valeria is a Hunter, and Madeline is a Shield. They all have specific objectives that they are seeking to accomplish, but there is really so much more to this story. Apparently, there is one dreamer and one hunter per generation but this is where it gets twisty, Valeria doesn’t inherit her role until her mother passes away and Valeria does something as a young girl that she thinks will help her mother live and not die
Thomas can dream up different worlds, but he doesn’t know it. All he knows is that he dreamed something about his previous coworkers and the next thing he knows, the building where he worked has collapsed and there are 200 people dead.
Adelaide/Valeria is the Hunter seeking the Dreamer to end his life. Not doing this would have dire consequences for her and she was already feeling some of the effects from not seeking him out and ending his existence.
Madeline is the Shield out to protect Thomas from Valeria, but does she have ulterior motives? It seems like she is just doing her job, but as the story continues, I began to question why she was so insistent on Thomas doing certain things while he tried to get a grasp on his new skills.
When Thomas and Valeria come head to head, the end result was a bit of a surprise, but since this happened approximately 1/3 of the way into the book, I knew there had to be more. It is hard to discuss the rest of the book without giving away some of the details that might come as a surprise to the reader.
I liked how the story flowed back and forth between Thomas and Valeria’s perspectives. I felt drawn into the story as I reflected on what each character was experiencing and what they were thinking. After the moment where the situation came to a head, the result was quite a surprise for me and the characters. The story continues with a supernatural flair and a little bit of mystery on how this would all end.
The ending was appropriate but left me with a few questions about possibilities for the lives of the characters after the book ended. Perhaps that is just left up to the reader’s imagination.
Overall, we give this book 4 paws up.
About the Author
Irina Slav was raised on folk tales, classical myths, and home-cooked meals. She wrote her first supernatural story as a class assignment when she was 17 and got the critical acclaim of her Communication Studies teacher. Her first attempt at a novel left her horrified by the magnitude of such an undertaking but she was stubborn and a certain number of years later her first successful attempt at the long form, The Lamiastriga, made its way into existence. Between novel drafts, Irina also writes short speculative fiction and horror. Her stories have been included in several anthologies. Irina lives in Sofia with her husband and daughter.
