Anna DeStefano
Dark  Legacy

Review brought to you by OBS staff member Heidi

Maddie and Sarah Temple are twins with a special psychic connection.  They are able to read people’s thoughts and know what they’re thinking and what’s going on around them.  Maddie learned how to block this ability at a young age, but Sarah learned to use it and manipulate people to do what she wanted them to.

When they were young they found an old paper that spoke of “the Temple Legacy” that came from a relative from the witch trials and spoke of a set of twins being born and how they could choose evil or good.  Their mother took the paper and threw it away and told them to pretend that it never happened.

Then, when they were teenagers their parents went to pick Sarah up from jail, as she was always in some kind of trouble or other.  They got into a car wreck that killed their father and left Sarah in a coma.  Maddie saw the whole thing even though she wasn’t there through the psychic connection she had with her sister.

The girls’ mother packed her and Maddie up and moved away for a fresh start.

Now, ten years later, Maddie is having horrible nightmares that include Sarah and that horrible night.  They are so bad that they are affecting her during her waking hours as well.  She is about to lose her job she loves as an E.R. doctor because the hospital doesn’t trust her alone with patients.  A hospital psychiatrist that Maddie had dated in the past, Jared Keith, is her last chance of saving her sanity and her career.

It turns out that Sarah isn’t in a coma anymore, in fact, she is at a local research center where they have been doing testing on her.  They are using Sarah to not only connect to people through dreams, but to actually project dreams to these hosts.  The ultimate goal is to be able to use Sarah as a government weapon by having her project dreams to people where they could kill themselves or someone else that they feel is a threat.

The lead doctor, Richard Metting, has another agenda though and is making sure that Sarah doesn’t become the weapon he’s supposed to be making her into.  But, someone else has been piggybacking his methods and implementing his own dream projections for her, making the results deadly.  This other person is also the one that has forced these dreams onto Maddie as well.

Now Maddie, Jared, and Dr. Metting must find Sarah and discover who is doing this and stop them before anybody else is killed and before Maddie goes completely insane.

When I read the blurb on this book I thought it sounded intriguing, but I must say that the story just didn’t live up to my expectations at all!!  I found that it was a miracle and a true act of will that I was even able to finish this book as reading it was a slow torture.

When I first started reading the book, everything was a bit confusing, but then once I started understanding what was going on it just became repetitious and boring.

I found the characters to be one-dimensional and not really complete.  I also thought the constant dreams mixing with reality annoying and repetitive, especially considering the dreams were pretty much all the same, with just slight variations.

I also really hated how Maddie was so dependent on Jared and that she couldn’t really do anything on her own.  I like my heroines to be strong and for them to be able to care of themselves and Maddie just couldn’t.  I honestly can’t even consider her a heroine.  She was too weak and just felt like a shell of a person.

I’m amazed after reading this book that there is a sequel, Secret Legacy.  One of which I can assure you that I won’t be reading.