Book Review: Dream, Recurring (Island River Tales Book 1) by Mark Canniff

Author: Mark Canniff
Publisher: Mark Canniff
Publication Date: August 30th, 2016
Genre: Paranormal
Pages: 288 Pages

Blurb

Can there be a mystery that goes back over a hundred years, that only the dead can reveal?
Lucy has been having a recurring dream. Night after night she finds herself driving on a winding road with her best friend Sam. She feels lost as this path seems to lead to nowhere. That is until she discovers a house. Curious, she goes up to investigate, discovering that the place is empty.
The mystery of the dream deepens when she realizes that she’s being haunted by an entity. Why is it attached to her?
Both Sam and she uncover a piece of history that only those that have passed on have kept secret. Why is it so important and does it have anything to do with the dark being?
It suddenly becomes a race against time as they grasp that their very lives might be at stake.
Can they uncover what is really going on in time, before it’s too late?

Is there a connection between the house, the uncovered past and the evil entity?

Review

3.5 Stars

The story starts with Lucy and her friend Sam and together they fight spirits. Soon enough a murder changes everything and together they try to figure things out.

Sam, who is a medium, tries to communicate with the spirit and understand why the spirit is so angry. Lucy and Sam have dreams where the spirits try to help them solve the murder.

I really liked Sam a lot more than Lucy and I could connect to them very easily. We get to learn more about Lucy and it made me connect to her and understand her a lot more than Sam. Even though I like Sam a bit more than Lucy, I still wanted to know more about him and his past, but there weren’t many details about Sam’s past.

At first, it took me a bit to connect with the story and the characters. It was a slow read up until then I got to the first third of the book. From there, the story unfolded and I started to really care about the characters.

I loved the writing style itself, but there were a lot of grammar errors which really made it more difficult for me to read and enjoy the book (the reading flow was interrupted by the errors). This is the main reason I gave the book a 3.5-star review and not a 5-star review. I had to re-read the same paragraph again and again and it just slowed down my reading.

The other thing that really made the reading a bit slower was that I felt as an outsider. I enjoyed the plot a lot and loved the helping spirits, but I really wanted to get to be more involved with the story.

To sum things up, I really liked reading the book. It’s a good paranormal story with some nice twists. It has strong characters and the scary bits were done really well. I think with a bit more editing, this book would have gotten a 5-star review from me.

You can find the book over at

Goodreads / Amazon

As always, thank you so much for reading ❤

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