1986, San Diego.When his father returns from a submarine deployment, Christian’s family splinters apart. The boy’s evangelical mother demands a divorce. His older sister announces that she has dropped out of college and is moving to LA with her guitarist boyfriend. And then Christian discovers that there are surveillance microphones in their home. He and his hacker friends are investigating the … investigating the situation when suited government agents with strange mask-like faces appear on the naval base. Dad thought he had more time, but he must tell his son the truth now: Christian was born with special abilities—the Navy has been monitoring his development because he is destined to become a Dream Telepath.
He must learn how to enter the dreams of others and control the ancient monsters of the deep. His powers are essential to defeating the Soviets and preventing nuclear war. But is Christian ready?
more
I enjoyed reading this book for the most part, but I do have mixed feelings overall. But first…
What’s this book about?
The book starts with Christian and his group of friends living their normal life. Things go crazy quickly and Christian finds out that magic exists in the world and that even he has some special power.
A good friendship.
My favorite part of this book was the friendship between the kids. It’s so hard to find books with strong friendships, where best friends aren’t pushed aside so only the main character can shine. Well, not here, the author did a good job and I can only respect that. Did I also mention that there’s very very minimal romance? Oh yeah!
Action, action, action.
I’ll admit that it took me a while to get into the book. But once I did, it was a very easy and fast read. The plot moved pretty quickly, a lot was happening at the same time and there was a lot of action happening in general. The book did a good job of keeping my attention and I can’t say that there was a time I’ve got bored.
A little convenience?
Much of the plot has to do with a group of teenagers going on a very difficult mission. It’s hard to imagine how a bunch of teenagers can deal with top-secret organizations and very powerful people and I wasn’t really convinced how they were able to do many of the stuff they did. Apparently one of them has like insane hacking skills and can hack literally into anything and another is so rich that she can buy a whole car when the need arise. These kids hacked into a big company that worked in something super secret and even tricked the police into giving them documents, while I was thinking that they’re still teenagers right? Can they really do all this stuff that easily? Overall I found that there were some conveniences, otherwise what these kids tried to achieve would be impossible.
About the magic…
Even though the whole concept with the dreap telepath was interesting, the whole magic part of the book was very confusing. We get a better explanation of dream telepaths and how they work, but we get almost nothing for everything else. And there are creatures that live both in earth and sea and then there are the ancients which I’m still not sure what they are and what connection they have to dream telepaths. What little information we got, was after halfway through. So basically I spent more than half the book being completely confused about these creatures, while all the characters talked about them like we should already know what they are.
Final thoughts
As I already mentioned, Cold War Dreams definitely has some flaws but at the end of the day what matters is how much fun I had while reading it and fun I had. There are many layers on the plot and some more polish wouldn’t be a bad idea. This book is good but it could be better.