Review: Blind the Eyes by K.A. Wiggins (Threads of Dreams #1)

Blind the Eyes (Threads of Dreams #1)
K.A. Wiggins
Published: June 1, 2018 (Snowmelt & Stumps)
Purchase: Book Depository or Amazon
Review Source: copy provided by publisher in exchange for an honest review 

Reviewed by: Beth

Rating (out of 5): 3 stars

Cole lives a dreamless life—both sleeping and awake. Dreams are not allowed, for they will call the Mara, who will first eat the dreams—and then kill the dreamer. So everyone in the Refuge wears the same color and style of clothing, wears masks to hide their faces, eats a food-adjacent paste called Noosh (that also turns them grey), and is forbidden to even acknowledge the existence of others. Cole, however, she struggles to fit in, to blend…to NOT DREAM. Until the day she steps into someone else’s dream.

Blind the Eyes takes place in some nameless city somewhere. Though honestly, very little about the city is known, including its name. The reader learns there was flooding, one day, but not too much else. The story itself is pretty much contained within one building—an apartment? Skyscraper?—within the city itself.

Cole is the main character, though she has a ghost that hangs out with her. She’s young, naïve (though “stupid” crossed my mind more than a few times), and stubborn—none of which tends to work out well for her. She’s flat as a character, and starting about halfway through the book, she drove me crazy. She makes the same choices over and over again, she was oblivious about things that should have been obvious, and she never really managed to mean enough to me to really care about her outcome. Honestly? I liked her ghost better. The other characters were similarly flat—their motivations hard to parse out, and their strands woven together in, oftentimes, nothing more than a confusing mess.

The story itself started out GREAT. I was excited, and eager to read more. But as mentioned above, about the halfway mark, I started getting frustrated. There was a sense of déjà vu with the constant mistakes, and the absolute blindness her character exhibited to things happening around her. I won’t give any spoilers, but I will say that parts of the story could easily have been left out and NOTHING would have changed in any significant way. Honestly, I sort of stopped caring at some point what anyone’s motivations might be, and just wanted them all to GET ON WITH IT. *sigh*

Blind the Eyes is the first in a presumed series, and it had so much promise. It still does, if things can get ironed out in book two. The premise is interesting, and as I mentioned, the first half of the book was great. While I will keep my fingers crossed that the second book makes it the whole book, I won’t be rushing out to read it to make sure.

Sexual content: none