Dream Warrior – Sherrilyn Kenyon
Hachette Piatkus, 2009
314 pages
RRP: AU$19.99
ISBN:978-0-7499-0905-5

Reviewed by Kate Smith

Dream Warrior is a story set among the ancient pantheon of the Olympian Gods who still exist in the modern day.  With war breaking out, the ancient Greek gods have to look to an individual they exiled thousands of years ago, Cratus, for help.  It comes down to a defender of dreams, Delphine, to try to convince this god not to join the side of dark and to fight for those who have persecuted him for six thousand years.  In this process he learns to trust and she learns to embrace emotions she has never experienced before.

On reading the back cover, I was expecting a different story to the one I read.  For this reason I was disappointed and irritated.  I could see so much more potential for the concept of this story.  So much could have been better explained.  I found the description of the different gods and their relationships problematic due to their over simplification, and the relationships between different pantheons of gods from different cultures was awkward.  Also, the language that these ancient deities used was particularly modern, not something most had any reason to have picked up through interaction with ‘modern’ humans.

The plot was, after a promising beginning, formulaic, with events unfolding in a manner which did not take a Seer to anticipate.  Certain conventions of science fiction/fantasy writing were held to with frustrating tenacity, one example being that the ‘good guys’ were the put upon, hard-done-by band who all came from different backgrounds, and the ‘bad guys’ were those in the position of power.  There is nothing new to engage the reader in this story and Kenyon has chosen to use a very well known pantheon for her story which allows a greater number of people to find issue with how the pantheon is portrayed.  In my mind the title does not match the story well and the cover art seemed to have little connection to the main characters.

Having said that, I picked up this novel to read with no idea of the background of the author or the type of novel Kenyon writes.  Once I realised this it became very clear that the novel was exactly what it was supposed to be.  It is a light-weight and easy read and if you don’t expect anything else from it there is entertainment value for the time taken to read it.  Even considering this, however, it has not left me with any desire to read other books with similar titles by Kenyon.