Review: The Luminaries by Susan Dennard

The Luminaries by Susan Dennard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was provided an audio arc of this book from Macmillan Audio via Netgalley, all opinions are my own.   I enjoyed the narrator and felt she did a great job with this book!

I loved this this!  I'm a huge fan of Dennard's Witchlands series and was excited to hear that she was bringing us a new YA paranormal/fantasy series.  This follows Winnie Wednesday, an aspiring "monster hunter".  Winnie lives in a world where the paranormal is normal, her mother was hunter until their family was outcast.  Now that Winnie is 16 she can enter the trials to become a hunter herself and potentially end the 10 year shunning her family is under.  No one including Winnie thinks she is quite prepared to take down a nightmare on her own, but through a series of unplanned events Winnie finds herself moving forward in the trials and needing help from her former best friend.  She has a hard time reconciling the people that used to be her friends and the warm welcome she receives after passing the first of the three trials.  She also doesn't understand why no one seems to care about the mysterious new nightmare that only she has seen in person and all the other nightmares seem to be terrified of.  

I thought the world building in this was done well.  Each of the creatures or nightmares was described with great detail so you could really picture what they looked and even sounded like.  The Luminaries have a compendium of knowledge that Winnie often recites when she is nervous so we get to know alot about the monsters she is facing when she is out in the woods alone and scared. I thought the idea of the Luminaries themselves was really creative with each branch belonging to a different day and specialty while all belonging to the larger collective group.  I'm not quite sure how the Luminaries stay contained from the rest of the world and I don't think that was really explained.  There was a bit about screening outsiders or nons before they are let into the Luminary world though so there must be some magic at work there.  I liked Winnie's character development throughout the story.  She's got alot going on and alot to deal with.  She still has some growing to do as she learns more about what happened with her father and figures out what this new nightmare is, but she came a long way from the girl on page 1.  I'm looking forward to seeing how she grows in the future and what is in store for her in the next installment.  This doesn't end on a cliffhanger persay but there are some big plot threads left open at the end of this book that I'm expecting we will get more info on in book 2.

This is a fun YA urban fantasy.  The plot isn't super complex as you would expect of an adult fantasy and the characters act their ages.  They are teenagers faced with hunting monsters, but also dealing with regular teenage stuff like school, friendship, birthday parties, and family drama.  At times they are fearless and brave, while other times they are regular teenagers.

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