City of Nightmares: The thrilling, surprising young adult urban fantasy

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When that day rears its horrifying head, the director of the organization kicks Ness out for repeated mistakes, leaving her with no place to stay. This book reads like one of those, but if they were unfunny and went on for almost four hundred pages. The protagonist Ness' life was shattered 8 years ago when her own sister turned into a giant spider and ate a bunch of people alive, including their dad. Ever since her sister became a man-eating spider and slaughtered her way through town, nineteen-year-old Ness has been terrified--terrified of some other Nightmare murdering her, and terrified of ending up like her sister.

Some people who become Nightmares are monstrous only in appearance, able to live semi-normal lives, but others are twisted in body and mind from what they’ve become, and Ness will do anything to avoid becoming like her sister. If you dream, you run the risk of having a nightmare, which you will MOST DEFINITELY morph into by morning.The big difference is that one of these books did that in an interesting way while the other is City of Nightmares. Readers will welcome this is a series opener, as there is still far more to explore in this world that is mostly bleak but with just enough hope to make the bitter sweet. SERIAL KILLERS, and she spent a sizable amount of her book going on a tirade about how fiction tricks women into being more tolerant of abuse. How many of us would sign up for that dangerous quest, or that big bad boss showdown, or that heist against the odds? I used to be a big fan of Rebecca Schaeffer (who incidentally shares her name with a murdered model).

Unfortunately for Ness, safety is just an illusion in the corrupt and dark city of Newham, and she soon finds herself caught in a conspiracy that would see her dead. She got herself free room and board by joining the Friends of the Restful Soul, which is Definitely Not a Cult, but her membership is threatened when her paralyzing fear of Nightmares prevent her from doing her door-to-door recruitment duties properly.She's a self-professed coward, one who can barely handle the benign Nightmares that walk the streets harmlessly, not to mention the actually dangerous ones.

Main characters are assumed White; same-sex marriages and gender equality at the warfront appear to be the norm in this world. I'm sure this book will appeal to readers looking for a snarky, self-deprecating, and sensible (but strong in the end) heroine. but also “dreaming means waking up as your worst nightmare” and “queernormative world” and “morally questionable main characters” WHERE HAS THIS BOOK BEEN ALL MY LIFE? Ness jumps from safe zone to safe zone under the constant internalized threat of Death by Nightmare.

With a horrible crackle of bone, her body lengthens, elongating into something stretched and contorted. One of my issues with this book is simply that there is SO much focus on breakneck plotting that we hardly get any character development or proper world building, something I look forward to when reading books that are fantasy or paranormal centric. I also don't add friends and I don't have time to keep up on all platforms, so Goodreads is just for posting book reviews. There's a lot of problems with it, but by far one of the most annoying is how often this key piece of Ness's backstory is brought up. This is one of the few books where I didn't see many of the twists coming and was surprised every time.