The Dream Heist (The Dreamscape Series)

Rating 4 out of 5

"Heists. Murderers. Kidnapping. Bombs."

Eighteen year old Aria loves her job at her father's dream therapy company where she enters dementia patients' dreams to save their memories. But when their lab is ransacked, two technicians are murdered, and her father is kidnapped, everything changes for her. Determined to find her father, Aria and her friends embark on a harrowing hunt across continents using the dreams of their enemies to guide them. But this dangerous journey plunges her into a world she never bargained for: deception, intrigue, even love. As she races to save her father and hunt down her enemies, she soon realizes she's in fact the one being hunted. And her dreams are the greatest danger of all.

I really liked the idea of this book! I mean being able to enter into people's dreams and try to save memories seems pretty cool. I honestly got some Inception vibes with them entering into the Dreamscape as Dream Walkers. The whole point was to guide the dreamer without interfering too much. It was really cool that they started this as a way to try and save the memories of Aria's grandmother who was diagnosed with dementia. The whole concept was just super cool and I liked that it wasn't really heavy on the science aspect. It was more a focus on the dreams and interpreting them.

Aria's dad created the Dreamscape concept off her brain and she becomes important to the ability of the group of Dream Walkers to stay within a dream for more than a few seconds. Aria and her group are on the search for something called the Vault of Memories, and when they get a new client it feels like they may be close to finding the missing piece to connecting memories. Of course everything goes horribly wrong when her dad is kidnapped and the book shifts to a quest to locate her dad with a group of unqualified friends. Which is why I felt some of the journey to be a little unbelievable considering the main characters were only 18 years old.

I was glad that the book had a resolution but I felt like the robbery and kidnapping together caused elements of each story to be overlooked sometimes. A few times the author had some typos with character names that kind of took you out of the moment, but overall these were minimal and seemed to be reserved for the end of the book. The problem of course is this is where all the action was. While I enjoyed that the book didn't end on a massive cliffhanger and I could feel mostly complete with the story, some stuff was left unresolved for sure. My biggest complaint with this book is that we didn't get more of the Dream Walking stuff. Overall, the story was nice, fun, and a really interesting concept.