Review: Please don't let this be the only review on this book that you read.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 12 26, 2012
I read Nightmare within a Dream as part of a list of books to read and review. I started reading, thinking "this is a lot like Harry Potter"! It is, but that's not ALL it is!  This story is about students in magic school and how they must learn about themselves and their magics. This story is darker than HP and the problems the students have are throughout the first book and into this second of the series.My problem with the book is that it brought out the teacher in me. I have taught writing in an elementary school, off and on, for 15 years or so. I started reading and soon found that formatting was off. Page breaks were hard to distinguish. Chapter breaks were nonexistent!  Margins changed too often. These are not things that I would think the author could control. I do, however, think that whoever was paid by the author to take care of formatting did not do the job they were paid to do.A better proofreader would have caught many of the other problems. Things such as run-on sentences and subject-verb agreement should have been fixed!  Word usage was, in some places, horrible!  Using, for example, the word however twice or more in one paragraph caught my attention the first time it occurred. Using the word "but" as many as five times in a paragraph made me crazy!These are all "little things" to many readers, but to a writing teacher in the state of SC, this was poor writing style.With some more work to straighten out these issues, I think that this could be an excellent book for younger readers!  Please, Ms. Rochholz, consider reworking and re-releasing this book!!