A dark and absorbing allegory for the power that young people possess in their bones to change things that feel far bigger than them, A Better Nightmare is a whirlwind adventure — a story of friendship, romance, and a radical crusade for one group of teens to fight for their right to feel.
A BETTER NIGHTMARE
by Megan Freeman
Chicken House/Scholastic, March 2025
(via Northbank Talent Management)
If the entire world believes in a lie, does that make it the truth?
Emily Emerson is nearly sixteen, finally a senior at the Wildsmoor Facility. But so is Meera, isn’t she? Meera, who is nineteen and has been a senior for as long as Emily can remember? Here, the students live each day as shadows, one day blurring into the next, hardly aware of life passing them by while the symptoms of the Grimm Cross Syndrome that afflicts them all is trained out of them. Rules. Order. Repetition. Medication.
Emily was eight when she started showing signs of the disease. Odd dreams, hallucinations – impossible things that happened around her. Unconscious thoughts that could be set free into the world—flowers that covered the house, thick like a forest and sowed with nothing more than her unconscious thoughts. It was beautiful until it turned evil, when Emily did her first bad thing and found herself here. Now, she’ll do anything to get better and get back to her life. She’ll be more quiet and obedient than everyone else.
Until she meets Emir.
Emir isn’t like the other kids at Wildsmoor. He’s quicker and livelier. He says things that he shouldn’t – dangerous things. Emir is electric, magnetic in more ways than Emily can know.
When Emir introduces her to The Cure, a secret society for kids who believe that The Grimm isn’t a disease at all, but a gift, Emily starts to wake up, and so do her strange abilities. The outcome is a dream come true. But sometimes the best dreams and the worst nightmares have the same people in them.
Megan Freeman writes young adult fiction and loves all things magic and mythology. She juggles writing with her day job working for a children’s mental health charity, promoting wellbeing through surf therapy. Megan hails from the far west of Cornwall, and when she’s not working or writing, loves tramping around the moorland and swimming or surfing in the sea.
Izzy Morales has spent four long years at Marian Academy ignoring whispers about her scholarship status and over-washed uniform while suffering the humiliation of waving to her math teacher-mum in the hallways. So when her best-friend Kassidy surprises her by inviting five of their friends to celebrate graduation by living like 1920s socialites at Ashwood Manor on Bartleby Island, Izzy is ecstatic about the escape and delighted about a week of fancy cocktails and even fancier dresses. But when Kassidy’s boyfriend turns up dead, the sparkling young socialites quickly become the prime suspects in his murder. Before they can flee back to the mainland, a raging storm traps them on the island with the criminal investigators including Pilar de León, a famous consulting detective whose quirky demeanour belies her killer instinct for sniffing out murderers. Everyone has a secret. Everyone has a motive. But only Izzy brought a knife to the party.
When seventeen-year-old Eli arrives at Raeth, a remote mountain retreat for teens with mental health issues, her mind is made up—she is not interested in participating, and she doesn’t need to “heal.” Still reeling from a breakup that left both her heart and faith shattered, she is determined to fake being “fine” so that the program’s warden will clear her to return home.
Moonlight Bay is a magical place—or it was once. After a tragic death mars the town, the pink and lavender waters in the bay turn gray, and the forest that was a refuge for newcomers becomes a scourge to the townspeople. Almost overnight, the entire town seems devoid of life and energy. The tourists have stopped coming. And the people in the town are struggling.