Early Review: Disciple by Jody Wallace (DreamWalkers #2)

Disciple (DreamWalkers #2)
Jody Wallace
Published: Dec. 23, 2014 (Samhain)
Purchase: Amazon
Review source: copy provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review

Reviewed by Amanda

Rating (out of 5): 4 stars

It’s been three months since Maggie learned she was an alucinator and started training. Three long months of learning to shield and swallow her fear and resign herself to her mentor’s indifference. She can’t move on in her training until she learns to shield herself in the dreamsphere, and Zeke’s getting frustrated. For more reasons than Maggie’s inability to produce a proper shield.

His own shields are still perforated from a wraith attack a year ago, when his last student turned out to be a sociopath and tried to kill everyone. Being around Maggie and not being able to kiss her senseless isn’t helping matters.

Their training regimen is interrupted when Zeke’s called to an outpost to check into the deaths of several dreamwalkers left in medically induced comas. What they find at the outpost is worse than any wraith they could imagine—and they’ll be lucky if they survive.

One word: Whedons. Whedons, yo. As in the scrunch-faced vampires created for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The world of Disciple was awesome and full of pop culture goodness. Wraiths are products of the dreamers’imaginations, so they take on all forms: mutant spiders, carnivorous dinosaurs, vampires of the Whedon kind, werewolves, and zombies. But only slow moving zombies. So far, no one’s imagined the fast-moving “zombies”straight out of 28 Days Later.

(And for the record, zombie purists will argue that is not a zombie movie, because they aren’t dead.)

There’s a ton of action in the second half of the book, but the first half is a bit slow, and I struggled with the first couple of chapters. There’s also a surprising amount of world-building, given this is the second book in the series. Things I would have expected to be explained in book one pop up in book two, bogging down the opening two chapters.

On the flip side, though, it was helpful, since I went into Disciple without having read the first book. I never felt lost, and there was plenty of backstory woven in to explain Maggie and Zeke’s relationship before the book opens.

I like Maggie, and I like Zeke, and I really like them together. They complement each other’s strengths, and while their relationship often took a back seat to figuring out what was going on at the outpost, it was necessary. Both were smart enough to realize they needed to solve the problem first, rather than have any sort of conversation about their currently non-existent relationship.

The monkey wrench in their works comes in the form of Zeke’s former student, Karen. And here’s where I had a problem. I hated Karen. There were times I wanted to smack every single one of the characters upside the head because they couldn’t see how manipulative she was (so kudos to Jody Walker for sinking me into the story enough I wanted to strangle Zeke on occasion). But after a while, she became very one-note. Karen’s thing was manipulation. That’s pretty much all we see from her. It got old, and I found myself wanting a more well-rounded villain.

The originality wins the day, though, and if there’s more to come in the DreamWalkers series, I’ll definitely be picking it up.

Sexual content: Graphic sex