Review: Stolen Dreams

Stolen Dreams by Christine Amsden

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I've liked the earlier books in the Cassie Scot series, and I have to admit that I didn't enjoy this one quite as much. If I was giving each book a rating out of 10, though, they would be 8, 9, 8, 7, so I'm by no means saying I hated this, just that the others were better.

It opens with several passages of telling rather than showing to catch us up on events since the last book. (This is the kind of series that has to be read in order, or else it's incomprehensible, by the way. There's very little "who are these people and why are they fighting" recap, and even having read the third book relatively recently, I was flailing slightly for a while there until my memory caught up.) It soon settles down, though, and moves forward at a similar pace to the previous books.

It's difficult to critique the rest of the book without spoilers. I'll just say that I felt that the author, who usually manages to dodge romantic cliches, didn't dodge quite as well in this volume. At least the characters did talk to one another, but then, they had to in order to get to the resolution. That resolution, I thought, was a little too neat and pat in the end, and required the series' main character and narrator to give up several desires and several attitudes that she had been hanging onto very firmly up until that point. The changes were justified within the story, but I didn't quite have the sense that she had won all the respect she deserved in the end to make up for her losses and concessions.

Again, let me say that this is very much an above-average book, and I did enjoy it. It just suffered in comparison to the earlier books in the series.



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