Official Review: The Dream Walker by Michelle Murray

[ALynnPowers]

[Following is the official OnlineBookClub.org review of "The Dream Walker" by Michelle Murray.]

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1 out of 4 stars

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The Dream Walker by Michelle Murray is a fast-paced fantasy book, likely targeted toward young adults or middle grade readers. It is the first book in the Land of Mystica Series. In this land of Mystica, a dark wizard has just been accidentally released from his stone imprisonment, but there is only one other wizard who can defeat him. In order for that wizard to be found and released from his own imprisonment, the Dream Walker must be called upon.

Miranda has just started her freshman year of college and has been having strange dreams; it’s as if they are calling to her. She soon learns that she is this fated Dream Walker, and she is sent off to Mystica to help track down the wizard that can bring peace back to their world. With a little help along the way, from both friends and her own magic, she travels through Ice Caves, the Lost Forest, and atop mountain caves that were once home to Dragons.

By now we’ve all heard the analogy that a story is like an iceberg. The movie-version of the story is just the tip, what can be seen above the surface of the water, but the book-version of the story is what’s under the water, the heaviest and most dense part of the story. Most readers, like me, will probably admit to preferring the book-version to the movie-version due to the experience of getting “more” out of the story. Unfortunately, this book reads more like a brief movie-version (or even a short-film-version) of a story. It’s fast-paced to the point of feeling rushed, without any fleshing out of characters, motivation, or logic. Things just simply happen without much detail or explanation.

I finished this entire book in less than two hours and was left feeling like I had just read a long list of events that happened, but I felt absolutely no connection to any of the characters. The main character of the story, Miranda, was not even introduced until Chapter 4, as the three previous chapters were merely providing the background story about the myth of the old wizards. Miranda was simplistically described several times as having brown hair and green eyes, yet this is as far as her description goes. I picked up no hint of her personality at all.

Additionally, this book seems to be a first draft; it is filled with typographical errors, missing punctuation marks at the end of sentences, incorrect word usage (“scared” instead of “sacred”), and awkward sentences. One particular sentence caught my attention: “He had earned his name by wresting [sic] a big black bear with his bare hands and nibble [sic] feet.” Even the name "Mystica" was misspelled as "Mysitca" at one point.

There is some potential with this book, especially concerning the setting of the story. I really like the concept of the wizards and other characters trapped in stones that have been scattered around Mystica, but 150 pages does not contain nearly enough words to adequately bring this world to life. With some editing and re-writing, this could be a much more interesting series. As it stands at the moment, I have to give The Dream Walker a rating of 1 out of 4 stars.

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The Dream Walker
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Like ALynnPowers's review? Post a comment saying so!

[PashaRu]

Kudos for an honest review. I hope the author will take this as constructive criticism and make some necessary changes. Seems like a good premise on which to build a story, but the storytelling skills themselves need some honing. We can't all be geniuses (genii?) like Mozart and get it perfect the first time, right?

[Heidi M Simone]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and providing an honest review, ALynnPowers. It was very well-written. There definitely does seem to have potential. Hopefully the author has read your review and is considering in expanding and tweaking her story to create a stronger book. Thanks again!

[kimmyschemy06]

The premise sounds very promising. Too bad about the flaws, though. Great job on a very honest review.