Review Detail

Reader reviewed by Stephanie

Stacey Brown and her friends are back in the third installment of Laurie Faria Stolarz's BLUE IS FOR NIGHTMARES series. It's the summer after they've graduated from high school, and the friends have rented a beachside cottage. Stacey is looking forward to swimming, tanning, having fun with her friends, and spending time with her boyfriend and soulmate Jacob--in other words, she wants to be a completely normal teenager for once.

But the nightmares return. This time, they're about one of their beachside neighbors, a irrepressible flirt named Clara with a fetish for taken men. Needless to say, Amber and Drea aren't too fond of her when she starts cuddling up to PJ and Chad, but Stacey knows that she can't just tell Clara to get lost, even if she IS annoying. Because Clara's life is on the line. And it seems that Stacey is the only one who can help her.

But there are other problems too. For reasons she doesn't know, Jacob is not telling her something. He's been having nightmares too, but he's not sharing them because he doesn't want Stacey to get even more stressed out. These secrets make it hard for the couple to get close together, and with all of these stressful things on her mind, Stacey has no clue that something even worse than her worst nightmare is going to happen... and that she will never be the same after.

Stolarz's writing gets better with each installment in this series. It seems like the secondary characters are more real than the protagonist herself. Amber and PJ provide much-appreciated humor, and I found myself gritting my teeth in every scene that Clara was in, she was just that annoying. It's a wonderful idea for a series, but sometimes it's just hard to feel close to the characters, or to believe that it could happen.