Dream Keeper (The Dark Dreamer Trilogy #1) by Amber R. Duell (Review)

   The Sandman is a mythical being that is the master of dreams. Using his sand, he puts people to sleep and rules the world of the night. In Dream Keeper, the sandman is real and in love with a young woman named Nora. Nora holds within her the power to effect the world of the night. She has the power to tip the balances between the Nightmare realm and the Dream realm, which makes her and her loved ones a massive target for The Weaver: the master of the Nightmare realm. She has this because of the Sandman, and he is relying on her not to cave and give in to the Nightmares, because if she does, all will be lost, in the Night world and in the normal human world.
     Twisted and waaaaay darker then I was expecting, this book has a hard focus on nightmares and horror movie level monsters and has almost no normal dreams or happy things (which is what I was expecting). Yah, this book is shockingly graphic and scary. It has grewsome self mutilation, multiple self murders through mind control, and a disturbing scene of self murder by pen violently being stabbed through the throat. Which leads me to my biggest complaint. Absolutely horrifying things happen in the real world to the main character (a normal teenage girl) and we are expected to believe she can just handle it and not have a massive mental breakdown. Its so unreasonable I was taken right out of the story. I don't know about you, but if a woman throat stabbed herself in front of me and my best friends killed themselves by ripping out there own eyes right next to me I WOULD LOSE MY CRAP! I'm talking about mental breakdown after mental breakdown, PTSD to the nines, becoming unable to see anything but the horror. Nora just takes it, brushes it off and keeps going. All of those events happen in the real world, those characters are ACTUALLY DEAD, and Nora is worried about if Sandman's affections are genuine. It was by far the worst part of the book. Otherwise it was a pretty okay book, and I give it the rating of THREE AND A HALF STAR OUT OF FIVE!!!

*Advanced Readers Copy Review*