Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Dangerous Dream (novella) ~ Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl (earc) review

(AT&T doesn't seem to want me to have internet lately; its inconsistent but oh so frequent connection failures paired with holiday busy-ness have messed up my posting. I apologize. [and glare at AT&T.])

** Synopsis/review contains spoilers for the Beautiful Creatures series -- find links to my reviews of those books at the bottom of this post **


Dangerous Dream (Dangerous Creatures #0.5
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
December 17, 2013
60 pages (ebook)
add to Goodreads/buy Kindle edition/or NOOK Book

Novellas are hard to summarize without telling the whole story, but I'll try:

It's time for Lena, Ethan and Link to graduate Stonewall Jackson High School and almost time to leave Gatlin behind. But, first, there's the whole summer . . . a summer with Ridley around and all the opportunities for something to go wrong. Something with great effects.

The Link and Ridley story of "Dangerous Dream" is around thirty-five pages (based on my Adobe Digital Editions) and then there's a preview of Dangerous Creatures. The first book in the Beautiful Creatures spin-off series Dangerous Creatures will be released in May and revolve around Link and Ridley.

It didn't really take anything at all for me to want to read Dangerous Creatures. The Beautiful Creatures books were so great and Link and Ridley were both fantastic characters whose interactions were even better so the idea of books centered on them was more than enough. What "Dangerous Dream" does, however, is set up just where Dangerous Creatures is going to start. A bit of what the stakes are.

While still leaving readers with quite a question.

One that makes you anxious to read the full book.

The characters felt as true in this enovella as they have in the previous four Beautiful Creatures novels. Ethan and Lena were Ethan and Lena (though I did picture them as Alden Ehrenreich and Alice Englert as I've seen the movie now . . .). Ridley felt a bit fuller than Link, in terms of seeing them as main characters, not supporting characters but that was likely as she had more story.

I loved that they both seemed like expansions of the characters we've already come to know in the other books.  There wasn't a different air to them now that they're the focus.

While that may change in the full novel, I hope it doesn't. It's really nice when the characters (who are the same characters) don't seem to be new characters.

"Dangerous Dream" may be a short novella but it's a great glimpse into what's coming with Dangerous Creatures and a it's really fantastic getting to slip back into that world, if only for a little bit.



 

Related reviews:
(Beautiful Creatures series reviews:
1 Beautiful Creatures
2 Beautiful Darkness
3 Beautiful Chaos
4 Beautiful Redemption

Icons by Margaret Stohl
Unbreakable by Kami Garcia


 digital galley received from publisher for review consideration

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