The book In My Dreams I Hold a Knife by Ashley Winstead is about a girl named Jessica who goes back to her college for a reunion. When she was younger, one of her friends was murdered, no one ever fully figured out what really happened. When that all comes back together secrets start coming out.
The story goes back and forth between the past and present. The author uses flashbacks to help us understand the characters better and see how their friendship changed over time. It builds suspense because we don’t learn everything at once. The author uses a first person point of view to show the story is told from Jessica’s perspective. This makes the narrator an unreliable narrator since she wants people to see her a certain way. We don’t always know if what she says is true. This made me think more while reading because I had to decide what to believe.
The foreshadowing in the story shows that there are hints about what will happen later in the story which made the book feel more exciting and mysterious. Characterization explains the characters more like Jessica is shown as someone who really wants to be perfect and successful, but she is also insecure. This makes her feel like a real person with struggles. She struggles with internal conflict, she doubts her own thoughts and feels guilt, and between the characters there are secrets that reveal external conflict.
I personally enjoyed this book because it was interesting and kept me guessing. It was a little confusing at times, but it also made it more fun to read. Jessica was not always a nice person but that made her more realistic. This book also made me think about how people act and why they sometimes hide the truth.
I would recommend this book to other students who like mystery and suspense stories. It is not just about solving crime but also about understanding people. Overall this book is really interesting, a little creepy and makes you think a lot.
Get the book! Check out In My Dreams I Hold a Knife by Ashley Winstead at the New York Public Library, Brooklyn Public Library, or Queens Public Library.
About the author This review is by an anonymous student.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
