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

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Tangled up in the aftermath of an explosive assassination, now Ness and the only other survivor - a Nightmare boy who Ness suspects is planning to eat her - must find their way back to Newham and uncover the sinister truth behind the attack, even as the horrors of her past loom ominously near. Allegedly, the City of Newham is supposed to be similar to the City of Gotham (you know, in Batman). She's decidedly NOT brave, or strong, or clever, or anything that distinguishes many other protagonists; she's a girl trying to do the best she can after withstanding awful trauma. Now, tangled up in the aftermath an explosive assassination that killed hundreds and left only two survivors—Ness, and a Nightmare boy who she suspects might be planning to eat her—Ness has to survive, figure out who’s trying to kill her, and stop them, before she loses everything that matters to her.

I mean, people literally turn into their worst nightmares whenever they manage to dream in their sleep. 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? Okay, so if you've made it this far into the review and are somehow NOT already interested, let me just say that City of Nightmares was such a fun and self-aware ride. Unlike many other MCs in YA fiction, Ness was terrified of almost everything, and very rarely willing to put herself on the line to face those fears.

With her position already in jeopardy, she ends up accidentally sucked into a targeted conspiracy that throws her together with a living Nightmare. Human Jude (whose brown hair curls and whose skin color is never described) both hates and loves Madoc, whose murderous nature is true to his Faerie self and who in his way loves her. I’ll just leave this here in case you change your mind,” I tell her, slipping a pamphlet onto the sideboard as I turn away. If you want whiplash, Gotham energy, and morally gray people everywhere with some of the funniest out of the blue lines you could expect, please, please, pick this book up!

Rebecca Schaefer has won me over with this book and I'm excited to check out her other series that looks just a dark and twisted. Her skin is morphing, stretching, melding, like there’s some sort of living creature inside her and it’s trying to burst its way out.This is especially annoying when it's giving insight into what Ness thinks, as it just spells it out for you! Ness will do anything to avoid becoming another victim, even if that means lying low among the Friends of the Restful Soul, a questionable organization that may or may not be a cult. That is when everything goes wrong and Ness learns that the life she held onto for safety was probably just a big lie, as she tries to find out why now someone is trying to kill her. The concept of you being turned into your worst nightmares was very creative and navigates this world well with her cowardly protagonist.

The irony is then that the author makes the male main character a vampire, thus making this book part of the problem she’s trying to criticize? In a world where people become their worst nightmares, Ness has to contend with explosions, monsters, assassins – and a cute vampire boy! The development that Ness went through was amazing and I felt like it went very realistic and smoothly. And none of those things are the worst selling point— it's the Nightmares that you have to worry about.

The worldbuilding’s a dream: The magical rules are revealed clearly and concisely when relevant, and the quirky alternate setting maintains internal consistency and is frequently revealed in pithy, hilarious ways. 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. Oh, and then there's the Nightmare that ends up in (and on) the same boat she's in, who just might turn out to be her only friend. I cannot remember the last time that I have been so eager to wake up every morning and choose reading a book over watching television.