Location: United States
Member Since: March 15, 2011
Melissa Dalton
Books
This member has not published any books.Smashwords book reviews by Melissa Dalton
- The Final Dream
on May 06, 2011
Imagine a world that is so rushed, so busy, that its people are constantly plagued by nightmares and insomnia. These issues are so commonplace that people regularly take sleeping aids and other pills that rob them of their dreamlives. If you found yourself in that situation, how far would you go to ensure that you could dream again? Would you subscribe to a nightly "dreambeam" session, where dreamweavers enabled you to sleep through the night and replaced your nightmares with pleasant dreams? The Final Dream begins when we meet Brian Drury, one of the three billion people who subscribe to Yosef Iones (the most popular dreamweaver in business), pondering over the previous night's dream. For Brian and others like him, the previous night's dreams were some of the most intense that he had experienced, but they ended in a cliffhanger. Although some subscribers aren't happy with Iones's choice, grumbling statements like "Why can't Iones just stick to what he's best at?" and "It would have been the greatest Starrytale ever if he'd finished what he started," as usual, they tune in again the following night for what they hope will be the conclusion of the dream. Instead, subscribers are faced with three consecutive nights of nightmares so horrific that they permanently change subscribers' lives. Some people quit their jobs; others commit suicide. The media and representatives from Iones's organization attempt to spin the nightmares as technical difficulties and assure their subscribers that they're working out the problems. But Brian doesn't believe them, and the truth that he discovers may be a nightmare come true. One of the things I love the most about Daniel Pearlman's story is the realistic elements of it. Although the book itself is sci-fi, I could easily see our society heading down this path, where people subscribe to dreamcasts as easily as they subscribe to cable television. I wonder what the long-term effects of something like this would be and how it would change our reality. Would we ever be able to function without it? Would we eventually become so dependent on maintaining our blissful, dream-like state that we would request to be left in our dream worlds permanently? I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves science fiction.
- Red
on Sep. 08, 2011
Synopsis taken from Goodreads.com: Elodie Rose has a secret. Any day, she’ll become a wolf and succumb to the violence that’s cursed her family for centuries. For seventeen years she’s hidden who and what she is. But now someone knows the truth and is determined to exterminate her family line. Living on borrowed time in the midst of this dangerous game of hide and seek, the last thing Elodie needs to do is fall in love. But Sawyer is determined to protect her, and the brooding, angry boy is more than what he seems. Can they outsmart a madman? And if they survive, will they find a way to beat the curse for good? Okay, I admit it. When I first picked up Kait Nolan’s Red, I was skeptical. And while I’m being honest, I’ll confess that I’m a little burned out on the werewolf-human-shiny vampire scene. So when I realized that Red was about a girl who was cursed to become a werewolf, I may have started to roll my eyes a little. Boy, am I glad I was wrong. Red had me hooked from the very beginning. When we first meet Elodie Rose, she’s writing a letter that’s similar to the one she received on her thirteenth birthday from her mother. The letter that changed everything in her life–the one that told her she was cursed and would soon be transformed into something horrible. In Elodie’s letter, however, she confesses that she wants to be normal, to have a life and grow to become an adult. She doesn’t want to die like the women in her family have before her. But she feels that the change is close, and she doesn’t know how much time she has left. Enter Sawyer. When we first meet him, he finds Elodie alone in the woods with a knife to her wrist, and he assumes the worst. As we soon learn, Sawyer and Elodie will be working together for the summer for Sawyer’s father, a local scientist who is trying to find a way to introduce red wolves back into their area. This was the first book I’ve read of Nolan’s work (her Mirus series is now on my list), but I enjoyed it so much that I finished it in two days. The attraction between Sawyer and Elodie is downright steamy at times (even in cold water), and the overall story was great. Her tagline, “Every fairy tale has a dark side …” is perfect for this book, and I thought the twist she created for Little Red Riding Hood’s fairy tale was great. I’m a big fan of twisted fairy tales, so I particularly enjoyed that aspect of it. Overall, Red is a great read for anyone who enjoys YA literature, and I was very sad when I finished and realized that Nolan hasn’t written any sequels to this one yet. Kait is represented by Laurie McLean of Larsen-Pomada Literary Agency in San Francisco. To learn more about her, visit her website or catch up with her on Twitter.