Review: Shattered Dreams

Shattered Dreams by Ellie James

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



3.5 Stars!

Trinity has recently returned to her birthplace of New Orleans. She moved to the mountains of Colorado when she was a toddler after her parents died. Her grandmother has recently passed and now she is living with her Aunt Sara back in NOLA.

Trinity is starting to have strange visions and dreams involving an acquaintance from school being abducted. But then the girl is really abducted. Trinity, being a good kid who wants to help, shares her visions with the police and she becomes suspect #1. Meanwhile Trinity has a personal quest to find out what really happened to her parents.

I got sucked right into the story…the fact that it starts out in a creepy abandoned house in the Garden District, sure helped. What was so personal for me about this book was the setting. N’Awlins is someplace I’ve visited often and love dearly! I could visualize so many of the landmarks and districts as I read in the story…it brought back so many fond memories!

I liked the story, even though some of the secondary characters were flat. Trinity is a good kid who wanted to help a girl who had gone out of her way to make Trinity feel unwelcome. And she continued to try and help even when everyone turned against her, which I would have found very difficult to do. Chase, the object of Trinity’s affections, however was not one of my favorites. He was an open book…he lacked depth. However, Dylan, on the other hand, was much more mysterious…I wanted to know more about him! This appears to be the beginning of a series, so I’m guessing a love triangle will figure prominently in the future.

The story did have some confusing parts that I found myself rereading a number of times and still didn’t really understand, little side streets we would start to venture down that would then be abandoned. For example, elements of Trinity’s parents that were hinted at, but never explained. Some of these asides seemed pertinent, but most didn’t.

Overall, I thought it was a good debut, though a little rough around the edges. Like I said, I loved the setting and the pacing of the book and Trinity is a character I would like to know more about.




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