Dreaming Death

4 of 5 stars at The BiblioSanctum bibliosanctum/2016/01/29/bLast year I read a wonderful novel called The Golden City, the first of a fantasy trilogy set in an alternate early 1900s Portugal featuring sirens and selkies. This was how I first came to discover the work of J. Kathleen Cheney. As you can imagine, I got pretty excited when I found out she was writing a new book! And this time, she’s transporting readers to a whole new world full of magic and amazing things to discover.Indeed, Dream [...]

Entertaining fantasy with a touch of mystery.This is a world that is used to dealing with 'sensitives' - those who can pick up on others' emotions and also broadcast their own. But Mikael Lee's 'gift' exceeds what anyone is used to. He might even call it more of a curse. He has periodic dreams in which he enters the consciousness of a murder victim, following them all the way to their death. However, his tendency to broadcast these grisly sensations to those around him has not earned him an exce [...]

I love Cheney's Golden City trilogy, and her new book (out in February) explores a whole new secondary fantasy world. At heart, this is a detective story with magical twists: a policeman is murdered in some sort of bizarre ritual. In the city, Mikael is locked in a dream, forced to experience the stranger's brutal death. Mikael's agony radiates to a likewise gifted sensitive, Shironne, whose abilities are already being used by local authorities to solve murder investigations. Mikael and Shironne [...]

Really cool psychic powers needed to solve a murder mystery! I loved the fact the heroine is blind but able to help in her own ways. The romance is sweet, and the emphasis on friends and family was great to read. I would have liked more world-building, and the pacing is a bit slow, but the series has fantastic potential.

I received a copy of this publication in exchange for an honest review.DNF @ 42%Well everybody, this is it. This is the first time I have ever put down a book and chosen not to finish it. And you know what? It likely won't be my last. If you've been following my reviews for awhile now, you know that I always push through, even when I'm just not that invested in the story. Today I randomly stumbled upon an article titled "10 Signs You Should Give Up on A Book You're In The Middle Of".I'm not exac [...]

Stayed up all night reading this. It's now 3am and I have to be up in 4 hours for work. Weeee. Really, there's no higher compliment. :)

Originally reviewed in a joint review at The Book Adventures.I enjoyed Dreaming Death. Similar to Cheney’s previous trilogy The Golden City, Dreaming Death also combines a rich fantasy world with mystery. While there is a great deal of detail about the world that Cheney puts her readers into, at heart, Dreaming Death is a mystery and I like that. Anytime an author wants to defy the bounds of genre categorization I’m game. Unlike more traditional mysteries, this one is solved using unique mea [...]

J. Kathleen Cheney's Dreaming Death whisks readers away to a world where some people possess psychic abilities that allow them to sense others' emotions. Shironne is one such sensitive, with powers so acute that they've rendered her blind. But they also make her useful as an investigator for the Larossan army, and able to see the dreams of a young soldier named Mikael - dreams of victims' deaths as they're occurring. When a serial killer begins terrorizing their city with ancient, deadly blood m [...]

3.5Originally posted at Vampire Book ClubShironne Anjir is a touch sensitive. Her powers, which manifested when she was twelve, have now grown so overwhelmingly strong that she’s gone blind. Not letting that hinder her, Shironne helps the Larossan army in various ways. She can tell someone’s innermost secrets just by touching them skin-to-skin. For all its advantages in helping her track down criminals, there are the obvious drawbacks. Then there are the dreams.Some nights Shironne has vivid [...]

This is a new novel by Cheney, in an entirely new world and I was so happy to be able to get a copy before the release and read it! I've read the 3 novels in her Golden City series, plus two other published novellas (one also in the Golden City world), and I've become quite a fan of her story telling. Her writing reminds me a lot of Sharon Shinn's - there's a quality about it that makes it so easy to get into the story, you get to care about her characters, and you can really feel a part of the [...]

Enjoyable, a lot of potential, I'd be interested to see where the author goes, great world building. Will be out in the feb RT magazine

This is a three and a half star read, but I'll probably round it up to four for a few reasons.The first four or five chapters of this book are a mess of infodumping and overly detailed character descriptions that I couldn't keep straight. It was a bit of a struggle to get through that, but once I did, I really enjoyed the rest of the story.I found the idea of touch-sensitivity really fascinating. I'd never thought about what it would be like to live like that. Sort of a sensory processing disord [...]

The blurb gives a good idea of the basics of the plot, so I won't bother with a re-cap.As a long-time SFF reader, I recognize the whole 'experiencing, in your dreams, deaths as they happen' as a fairly standard motif. The author adds the element of a second person who unwittingly shares the dreams--just to make matters a bit more interesting.The story combines the police procedural mystery (the who, why and how do we stop them), with a hefty helping of palace intrigue and cultural politics.The w [...]

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It's really creative and interesting, and I love the blend between magic, mythology and mystery that exists in this world. The social classes and political alignments are also very pivotal in shaping the story created by Cheney. Definitely a book I'd like to own for my personal collection. I'm just hoping that the rest of the series is either currently available or soon will be! I'm now a J. Kathleen Cheney fan, thanks to the "Palace of Dreams" series. :)

Love, love, loved this one. Fascinating characters, a great setting with multiple layers and variants, exciting plot, enough foreshadowing that things made sense when revealed, but without breaking suspense. Justloved it!

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J. Kathleen Cheney has a gift for creating heroes whose very strength also place them in a position of weakness in their world. They are angsty, and caring, and unprepared to handle their desire to protect the younger, more willing to risk all heroine whom they encounter.So we have Mikael Lee -- who is both the ruling/invader Anvarrid and the indigenous "Family" with a psychic power that forces him to dream murders in his city, and broadcast them to any psychically sensitive person around.This d [...]

3.5 starsI jotted some notes for thematic discussion as I read, then set the book aside when finished, to review when I had more time. Bad decision: I didn't note the exact dates, and just realized I still hadn't done anything more with it. Review still forthcoming, I'm afraid — I'm in the middle of something right now. *hides face*I will say there's never a criticism to be made re. the quality of JKC's writing. The mystery wasn't the sort where you have a cast of suspects to narrow down, but [...]

This was an enjoyable secondary-world police procedural. The political and sociological worldbuilding was complex and intriguing. The plotting was smooth, with just the right number of twists and turns. I probably could have done without the implicit, incipient romance -we could see it coming from a mile away, and the character relationships would have been more interesting without it - but overall I liked this quite a bit.

Review courtesy of Dark Faerie TalesQuick & Dirty: Dreaming Death is a dark fantasy with an excellent premise, decent execution but some of the world building slowed the story down.Opening Sentence: Liran Prifata’s dove gray uniform jacket lay to one side, his shirt tangled with it, pale blotches on the bare dirt.The Review:Dreaming Death is a dark fantasy novel set in a complicated world. I was very excited to get a copy of this novel off of NetGalley. I was intrigued to read a story abou [...]

Overall: I look forward to reading the next one. Interesting plot, but it could've used another few drafts before publication.Good: There are many things I like about this book. The culture (which I suspect has Russian elements to it), characters, and plot all grabbed my attention. Ms. Cheney did a great job world building. There were many layers to each culture (there was about 3 cultures all converging in one city) and she provided a detailed history regarding them. I find the concept of the f [...]

DREAMING DEATH introduces a rich, complex world filled with people from many cultures and practicing many religions, and a city where the Palace and the Army function as two distinct bodies that represent two cultures. An in between it all are the sensitives, people whose magic gifts them with the psychic ability to experience other people’s emotions. The stronger the sensitive, the more they’re affected by the feelings of those around them.Shironne Anjir is one such sensitive – actually, [...]

On the first read through I found myself a bit at sea with regards to all the cultures and who was in charge and who conquered who, but I was invested enough in the characters and the mystery to keep going. Once I finished the book I ended up going back to reread, and things made a lot more sense. That's not to say anyone else will be as slow as I am, it just very much read as if this wasn't the first book in the series/world and that readers would be familiar enough with the culture that it did [...]

Delightfully nuanced!Dreaming Death is an excellent story from J. Kathleen Cheney, the author of the Golden City Series. The city of Noikinos is plagued with a series of murders that resemble an almost forgotten blood magic cult’s rite. Two different groups investigating the murders are brought together to pool their resources and more importantly their respective psychics.Cheney writes an enjoyable story of the psychic pair tracking down the killers. Seventeen year old Shironne, a touch sensi [...]

"Dreaming Death" by J. Kathleen Cheney is the first story in the ‘Palace of Dreams’ series that features the remarkable Shironne Anjir, who inexplicably shares horrific dreams of death with a mysterious stranger she nicknames the Angel of Death. Mikael Lee has trouble keeping his experiences and feelings from disturbing the sensitives all around him, but he has managed to keep certain secrets from almost everyone…including the surly heir to the king, Kai. A series of murders with distressi [...]

J. Cheney first came on the scene in 2013 with her first novel, The Golden City. Since then she's written many fantasy-based books including Dreaming Death. From the first few chapters I knew this book was going to good. Cheney does an excellent job building up the plot and building the complex world around the characters. Although I enjoyed the first half of the book, it wasn't until the second half when the story pulled me in. The story is told from two different points of view: Mikael Lee and [...]

Think book was wonderful. Cheney's words made me feel as if I was actually there in the story with her characters.

"Who are you when you are alone?" is a fascinating question. Identity, it turns out, is a central question in this book, especially whether it is self-determined or more determined by the perceptions of others. Shironne is a blind touch-sensitive who is small for her age. Thus everyone around her assumes that she is a child when, in fact, she is four months shy of being "officially seventeen", the age of majority in her culture. In her culture, all that matters is what age you are on New Year's [...]

Loved this and read it in one day!Cheney is very good at creating interesting characters I get attached to quickly. In her first trilogy, I loved spending time with the two romantic leads and the male lead's mom. In this book I really liked pretty much everyone. Counting Shironne, Cerradine, Mikael, Kai, Dahar, Deborah, and Elisabet, that's seven characters who are all distinct and many of whom annoy each other, even though many of them are also friends, and they are all allied in some ways. Eve [...]

An excellent fantasy novel. A world with three different "races" of people. They have very different traditions, rules, and abilities. There is intermarriage. Mikael dreams of death. . . as it happens. He is also a broadcaster which means he forces the "sensitives" around him to dream along with him. One particular sensitive, Shironne, can remember the dreams better than others including Mikael can. She is a very young woman, 17 when we meet her, but she has been working with the army for severa [...]