Audiobook Review: Girl of Nightmares (Anna #2)

Author: Kendare Blake

Narrator: August Ross

Audiobook Length: 10 hours 3 minutes

It’s been months since the ghost of Anna Korlov opened a door to Hell in her basement and disappeared into it, but ghost-hunter Cas Lowood can’t move on.

His friends remind him that Anna sacrificed herself so that Cas could live—not walk around half dead. He knows they’re right, but in Cas’s eyes, no living girl he meets can compare to the dead girl he fell in love with.

Now he’s seeing Anna everywhere: sometimes when he’s asleep and sometimes in waking nightmares. But something is very wrong…these aren’t just daydreams. Anna seems tortured, torn apart in new and ever more gruesome ways every time she appears.

Cas doesn’t know what happened to Anna when she disappeared into Hell, but he knows she doesn’t deserve whatever is happening to her now. Anna saved Cas more than once, and it’s time for him to return the favor.

[Trigger Warnings]

Girl of Nightmares is the continuation of the first novel, Anna Dressed in Blood. As the two stories are continuous, it is best for readers to read each in order as events in this novel and review will spoil those in the previous novel. Cas is dealing with the aftermath emotionally about what happened to Anna at the end of the previous novel. The story takes place six months later with Cas continuing his ghost hunting missions along with his two friends, Thomas, and Carmel.

Things are still unfinished with Anna, Cas, and the Obeahman, so this story leads to the showdown between them. Cas is dealing with Anna being gone where he starts having nightmares about her. As Anna is away from Cas for part of the story, I missed having her around as a character. I would have liked a few bonus chapters from Anna’s POV as I enjoyed learning about her character, and I wanted to learn more about her. Cas and Anna’s interactions were a highlight of the first novel, so I missed them a lot in this one. They do interact in this story through events, but it is not the same vibe as the first since a lot has happened between the two points.

Cas has grown a lot as a character in his new role after events in the first novel, but in many ways, he still has many of the same characteristics. He is not always the most likable character, but his role and interactions with others make sense for the story. As for his friends, Carmel, and Thomas, I was surprised by Carmel’s character as she goes back and forth with some feelings and there did not seem to be enough content to support her going from one type of feeling to the next. I wish there were more content and exploration of these feelings as the changes did distract from the rest of the story.   

There is still some spookiness in this story, but not as much compared to the first story. This was a nice conclusion to the story as it wraps up the characters while still leaving some room for Cas to have additional ghost adventures. While the Anna duology is concluded, Blake has not completely ruled out the possibility of Cas having his own series. Since Blake has other content that she is working on, I am not sure if a Cas series will be made, but it is nice to know that there could be more ghost hunting adventures ahead. Overall, this novel does not live up fully to the previous, but it was a satisfying conclusion.