Daring to Dream

To understand Margo Sullivan you first have to meet the super wealthy Templeton family. Margo grew up living in the Templeton household because her mother has been the family's housekeeper forever and the Templetons treat their help like family. I cannot mention family enough! But, even though the super perfect Templetons have always treated Margot like family, she never felt she belonged to them or with them. While every other member of the family stayed close to home, involved with the family's multi-million dollar hotelier business, Margo always needed more, more, more. Like every character in a Nora Roberts novel, Margo sports a beyond beautiful face and impossibly perfect body. As a teenager she left her mother and the Templeton show more household in search of fame and fortune as an aspiring model. Jet setting around the world, Margo has been gone for years. She has been seen only in pictures as the face of a well known cosmetics company. At that time nothing could stop her, nothing until a scandal involving drugs, her manager and the bus he threw her under. Suddenly knocked her off her pedestal, Margot has to come crawling back to her mother...and the Templeton clan.
Every good N.R. romance has a beautiful someone fighting off his or her passionate urges towards a seemingly unwilling beautiful someone else. Daring to Dream is no different. When Margo arrives home with her tail between her legs, she alternates between hating and needing heir to the family business, Josh Templeton. show less

Sigh. Once again it seems like I read all the best Nora Roberts books already and am finally hitting the bland, uninteresting ones.

This, like tons of her others, is the first in a trilogy about yet another trio of women who are the best of friends and all grew up in the same house together. This first book focuses on Margo Sullivan, a.k.a. the Templeton housekeeper's daughter, who's still raised as though she's part of the family herself. The Templetons are a super duper rich family that owns hotels and resorts around the world. She grows up dreaming of the finest things in life, which are actually not that far out of reach considering her place of residence during her upbringing, and yet, we're meant to believe she has like, nothing. show more A poor tortured daughter of the help living in a gigantic house with two best friends, food on her plate every damn day, easy relationships with the Templetons, and somehow she laments about how woe is her and she has to struggle to even survive.

Margo decides to become a model and make something of herself. Ten years later, she's broke, caught in a scandal, and has nowhere to turn but back home. And enter Josh Templeton, the handsome son Margo always had a crush on, to the rescue!

Margo and Josh are probably two of the worst characters in the entire NB universe I've ever read about. Margo is self-serving, self-loathing, spoiled, prideful, arrogant, and downright annoying. Josh is just as arrogant, self-centered, condescending, hotheaded, jealous, and totally a jerk in many ways. They're supposed to be pining for each other for years all romantic like and we're supposed to fall in love with how they fall in love? These characters are incredibly weak and I can't buy their relationship if they sold it at a discount in Margo's new store Pretenses.

For example, Margo is pretty much set to declare bankruptcy and whenever one of her friends/family members offers to help her out, she outright refuses their help because she wants to prove to them? herself? anyone who cares? that she can do it all on her own. Except that everything she then does is as a result of someone's help.

Another example, Josh decides to accuse Margo of something she didn't do, doesn't stick around to wait for her response, and says the nastiest things to her. And he's supposedly in love with the woman? And she just lets him say them because she "fears" the coldness in his eyes? Bullsh*t!

We also get set up with this interesting prologue about a woman in love from the 1800s...that has just about nothing to do with anything else. I'm daring to dream this loose end gets tied up elsewhere in this trilogy!

I'm hoping these other two stories are not going to disappoint like some of those women from the NR Bride Quartet, but with what I've seen of them already, such a dream may turn into a nightmare. Ooo! show less

It took me longer than normal to care about this Robert's couple. While they were both rich and perfect, I was mostly annoyed and almost quit reading it. I dislike romantic leads who just expect life to work out. I want them to have to work for it, which eventually these two did. But the ending then seemed sudden and two quickly resolved.

So far, my least favourite Robert's story.

I really liked this story. It captured my interest from the start and maintained it throughout. I felt the emotions of the characters and I love it when the male admits love first. Margo loses everything in a scandal and goes home to her old friends including Josh, now an attorney.

I loved this series and honestly point to this towards those who love Roberts who want to know where she gets up her male and female avatars in her later works. Also most of her plots in her later trilogies are based on similar set-ups with the males and females too. That said, I always get a kick out of the Dream trilogy.

I only re-read this first book because I honestly was so busy with a huge amount of other books that I just didn’t have the time to break away and get embroiled in this world again. For those who are looking for a really good contemporary romance where the male and female main characters are hot together, you cannot ask for much more. That said, I didn’t really care for the male and female hero/heroine in this one show more (Margo Sullivan and Josh Templeton).

Margo acts like a jerk for a good majority of this book and so does Josh. I liked both of them much better in the latter books where they grew up and didn’t make you want to hog tie them both to get them to shut up. I think at one point I may have wished that Margo would lose her looks since that seems to be all she has going for her (seriously though her looks are commented on a lot).

I am stretching my brain a bit to recall if Roberts had another book such as this (main character friends with filthy rich people as a child and grows up lusting after the older brother) and I feel like maybe there are other books out there, I just can’t recall.

The writing is typical Nora Roberts which can be a comfort if you are in the mood for it. I think what throws me a lot in these books are sometimes conversations or wording will make me recall one of the later In Death books and I feel all confused. I think that is my one big problem with Roberts nowadays, none of the later books feel fresh, and when you go back and re-read the older ones you feel like you’ve read that story a dozen times or more.

The setting of the great Templeton house was interesting, I felt like the Templetons were modeled off of the Hilton family in a way. I am always laughing though at stories modeled on a family with a huge amount of money and they are hotel magnets.

The flow was off with this one though. I think it’s because it jumped locations way too much. And also most of the book was Margo and Josh being terrible or aggravating to the other one and you just get over that whole thing after about 10 minutes of reading it.

Roberts also does a great job of laying the groundwork for other characters in the next two books. I also like how Roberts in her later two books does a great job of calling back moments that we read and giving you another perspective. Though Daring to Dream is the first in the trilogy, I have to say that my favorite out of the three books is the next book in the series, Holding the Dream. show less

I came to the Nora Roberts party late, but having made an effort over the last couple of years of expanding my fluff horizons, I thought I should at least see what the fuss is all about. This was the first book I read from the author and it wasn't a bad start. I'd actually picked this book up a long time ago and put it down after reading the first few pages because, well, I'm not entirely sure why. There's nothing wrong with it over than it's a bit overwrought. In my older age, however, that didn't bother me in any way. In fact, within a few pages, I didn't want to put it down and, since this was my bedtime reading book, actually would head up to bed early just so that I could get a few more chapters in. (Going to bed early is unheard show more of for me.) I was unexpectedly drawn to the characters, surprised to like nearly every single one. The plot was also more than sufficient to hold my interest and didn't seem too dated. So why only 3 1/2 stars? It was very formulaic -- which obviously works for Nora Roberts, given her massive success. And, in a way, that's better for her since, although I have no interest in going back and rereading this particular book, I've now begun looking for her other books instead as they are a known and trusted quantity. I would certainly recommend it for a quick, engaging read. show less

Daring to Dream (#1 in the Dream Trilogy) follows fiesty Margo Sullivan from her modeling days, the inevitable fall from grace, and then straight jump into bed with a man who she's known all her life. This book, and I swear I don't generally say this about Nora Roberts' books, felt contrived and silly from the onset. I found Margo to be a brat and her newfound love, Josh Templeton, a jerk with anger and jealousy issues. Margo, of course the housekeeper's daughter, grew up in the fabulously wealthy Templeton household... think the Hiltons. If you can't imagine caring about Paris' love life, skip Margo's.

Margo's fall from fame to finding her love and newest successful and money-making adventure was too quick and left me not caring all show more that much about any of them. Giving the author the benefit of the doubt, I did pick up #2 in the trilogy, and I hope it doesn't disappoint. After all, few of her books have.

One of the things I love about Nora Roberts is her books aren't generally predictable. She has written trilogies on vampires (The Circle Trilogy), witches (Three Sisters Island Trilogy) and has a series of thrillers under the alias J.D. Robb, and all the ones I've read have been well written and pulled you in from the beginning.

So don't judge an author by one book, especially one as prolific as Nora. show less