I was not expecting anything more than a pulp fantasy and that's what I got. It was fun at times, hackneyed at others. I like wordy, but I have to say there were times when I was a bit frustrated at the author's wordiness. ( )

Fun, typical urban fantasy. The characters are a bit one dimensional but the action moves right along. ( )

First, I thought the cover was deceptive, showing a much younger man than the character visualized to me--too old to be the Indiana Jones type. Professor Piers Knight, the Brooklyn Museum curator, who is also an expert in ancient artifacts and their mystical properties, seemed a little too old school. I get the fact that he had that immortal thing going on, but he still would have picked up some modern use of language. I liked it being a quirk of the character but at times it seemed overkill and forced.

For a stone that was supposed to end the world, the Dream Stone didn’t have enough importance attached to it. It seemed like an afterthought to the story. I would have liked more mystique surrounding the stone itself other than just the blurb at the beginning about it being the reason for the disappearance of the ancient village of Memak’tori. The stone had all this cool writing on it and both Piers and Dr.Ungari seemed all excited about it at the beginning of the book. The engravings found at the dig uncovering Memak’tori, turns out to be the same “language of Dreams” as on the Dream Stone. But after their phone conversation that promised more the two colleagues didn’t seem very interested in what the stone said. I was expecting more of the excitement of the discovery in chapter two to carry on through the book, but no. I needed more to make me feel it was more than a rock everyone was chasing.

The story drags a bit for my taste with only a few spots of real excitement. The rest was a lot of Piers doing a monologue on various things or banter between Piers and the detectives or Piers and his assistant, Bridget Elkins—who was often referred to as “the redhead.” Redhead used once as description is fine, but to keep using it after that instead of using her name got annoying—this worried the redhead, the redhead decided, said the redhead—yeah, too much of that, just say Bridget.

I think the author got too stereotypical with the African American characters. There is really a better way to describe a character than for Piers, in directing Bridget to Human Services at the Museum, to say, “… assuring Bridget that if she could find a ‘short, round, nasty black woman that answered to Judith’ she would be in good hands.” Come on, there are other ways for a writer to show a person’s personality. Then there is the black security guard, Jerome Dribben, saying, “There’s a buncha cops and like worse than that waiting for you in your office—they didn’t none of ‘em look like the happiest of dudes, neither. Maybe you might want to be thinking about turning around—sliding back out the door.” Hack. Hack. Gag. Laudy, I do thinks this author done been watchin’ too many movin’ pictures from the 1930s!

It is unfortunate; I thought the story idea was great. It started out with a lot of promise. I think it could have been developed a lot more than it was. Mysteries, thrillers or adventures with an archeological slant, true Indian Jones style or like the Librarian, are my favorites to read. Granted you need to give the reader a chance to catch their breath when the momentum gets rolling but to totally slow it down to idle chit chat left me thinking, “OK, what were we doing now?” This book was a dream stone’s throw away from being a great read had the story not lulled in so many places. ( )

Why I didn't finish, the characters damned annoying. Read like Indiana Jones meets Irritating preppie guy. Only read first chapter.

Another book that I really wanted to like, and wound up very disappointed in.The concept is great - a director/curator/professor at the Brooklyn Museum (which IS he?!) dabbles in magic on the side, mostly by harnessing artefacts that he's "borrowed" from the museum or that his archaeologist forebears have collected through the years. He's accidentally involved in a plot to bring an ancient extradimensional evil to destroy humanity, and needs to figure out A) what's going on and B) how to stop it. There's FBI involvement, an interlude involving a major attack at Fort Drum that's blamed on terrorists, and some interesting gallavanting around with spirits. But that's where the good stuff starts AND stops.Knight is...an enigma, and not in a good way. His dialogue is rather stilted and anachronistic - which would be okay, if there were a reason for it. I think the author was trying to go for a super-pulp feel, in that he wanted to evoke both noir phrasings and Victorian adventure stories. But it falls EXTREMELY flat - the character sounds ancient and stilted, even though he's supposed to be in his early forties and very worldly. "Bless all the tiny monkeys" is his catchphrase, which is cute, but who on earth says "I would like to render unto you assistance" with a straight face? That latter phrase, by the way, is used unironically throughout the story - "render unto you" and other slightly archaic phrasings turn up regularly in the narrative phrasings, and they're jarring. Also, someone really needs to break the author of the habit of leading into dialogue using semicolons. It is NOT easy or fun to read things like "and she asked him; 'What just happened, professor' "Yes, with a line break like that. Someone get the red pen!By the way, "unexplainable" might be replaced with "inexplicable" in half the instances it's used here, to better effect. GET A THESAURUS.Moving on... what IS Knight? He's constantly referred to as "the professor," but there's never any mention of what he teaches, or where. He's called a director of the museum, but he seems to be, at best, one of the chief curators. Also, there's never any reference to him being, say, a doctor of archaeology - while others are regularly referred to as "the doctor of X." Seems some basic research into the workings of academia and museums has been ignored.Add to that Brigid. Oh heavens, Brigid. I loathe her, and I can't quite put my finger on why. Perhaps it's because she's there to be a set piece, and a convenient deus ex machina - she hauls Knight home once or twice, and puts him to bed, and makes soup for him, and is a general helpmeet in a domestic sense...only once does she show any real intelligence or capability, and that's to serve as a deus ex machina allowing the plot to advance with the discovery of a key piece of information.Yeah.And all the while, she's referred to constantly as "the redhead" or having her physical attributes talked up. No one can refer to her, it seems, without mentioning her hair, her stunning green eyes, her perfect bone structure, her long legs...you get the picture. She basically exists to be described, and then to wail about how overwhelmed she feels, and then to haul the professor away from danger. Lovely.The other women in the story are there to provide comic relief, nattering on about how sexy Knight is and being generally stereotypical "brainless office workers." Oh, and they're described, to the extent that they get any description at all, as "round," "older," or "short." Because we can't have anyone approaching Brigid the gorgeous, now can we?Severely disappointed in this book. Usually, in my reviews, I try to find something that I can latch onto as a good point - great characters, for instance, or a twisty plot, or an interesting magical system. There's...not much of that here. In fact, there's barely any. It's annoyingly written, with a trite and somewhat ill-formed cliche of a plot, with an unimaginative magical system and some honestly annoying characters and little character development. I feel hard-pressed to even give it two stars - it gets the second only because a one-star book makes me throw it across the room, and this one didn't quite stoop to that level. ( )