Book 3: The Dream Hunter

Along with fantasy and science fiction, my genres of choice, I love a good romance. Mostly because I’m a great big saphead at heart.

Laura Kinsale’s The Dream Hunter is a fairly good romance. Not the best I’ve ever read, but certainly not the worst.

Arden Mansfield, Viscount Winter is a shy, tormented solitary man who goes on worldwide expeditions searching for… something. He finds it briefly in Zenia, a young woman who he mistakes as a Bedouin boy in the Arabian desert. Zenia makes him promise to send her to England, and after Arden is shot, she uses his passport to get herself there. Arden turns out not to be dead, and he comes back and has to get to know her again, as well as the child they conceived after a passionate night of lovemaking.

Kinsale’s prose is quite solid. It feels authentic to me, and I think she’s researched her setting quite well. Arden is also a wonderfully compelling character. He’s my kind of guy, sarcastic and brooding, but with a shy, vulnerable side.

Zenia, however, stuck in my craw. I found her pretty unlikable from the first. I knew she was going to end up with Arden, but the ending felt rushed, and I felt sorry for the poor man. Zenia in the desert is a whiny wallflower with no spine. In England she’s a cold fishwife and a whining shrew. I thought Arden could have done better.

Overall, I’d give this book 84/100, because the prose and the narrative really did mostly cover the fact that I didn’t like Zenia.