The Dream Hunter

Honestly, this book is wild. And entertaining. And narrated by Nicholas Boulton, and though all her characters make one want to kick them in the head at one point or another... And all her heroes are quite lickable, this book had a higher "wish to kick" ratio than I've previously read. Particularly the heroine. Egads. I got it. And we had that wonderful benefit of knowing the hero's thoughts on her, but egads.

Zenia tested the limits of my patience. So kudos to Arden for sticking that out. But also, he had a knack for making it all worse, so there's that. I mean, they're Kinsale characters. They are a couple of nicely written disasters.

As usual, it's all beautiful and atmospheric and romantic, but what melted me right down to nothing is show more the father-daughter relationship. They share their spirit, and it was fabulous...3.5 & rounding uppity up bc NB earns his own damn star. show less

I'm slowly working my way through Kinsale's backlist. There are so few books that I have to spread them out, and I'm dreading the time when there are no more left for me to discover.

I always feel at a loss when discussing Kinsale's books--there's just so much to them.

The Dream Hunter is the story of Zenia and Lord Winter. She is the illegitimate daughter of an English lord and a powerful Englishwoman who's lived in the north African desert for all of Zenia's life. Lord Winter is an only son who's become an adventurer in reaction to first overprotection and then pressure to settle down.

He was born to wealth and privilege and plenty of loving, if stifling, attention. She was born to a mother who spent wealth as soon as she accrued it with show more little left for a daughter whose existence she preferred to forget.

They meet when Lord Winter is searching for a fabled horse. Zenia's mother, with whom he'd been acquainted, has just died, and he rescues Zenia, who's disguised as a young Arab boy, from the resulting chaos. He then hires "Selim" as his guide--the cost being to take "him" to England.

Eventually, they're captured, Selim/Zenia's identity is revealed, and... (avoiding spoilers here)... the story moves to England.

This is not your usual romance. In a usual romance, Zenia would be a plucky chit who'd charm everyone, but would retain her desert wildness. If you've read Kinsale before, you know better than to expect the usual. Zenia's much more realistic than that. She's grown up in a culture where women are chattel, and she disguises herself initially, not (like the usual romance heroine) to be marginally more independent, or freer, but to save her life. She fully expects that being discovered to be female would mean being sold into slavery. Her overriding goal, the one thing that keeps her going, is to get to England, find her father, and become an English lady.

Her goal is the exact opposite of Lord Winter's--the kind of life she longs for is exactly what he's trying to escape.

The whole story, the whole conflict between the two of them, stems from their characters, which in turn stem from their histories. It's an amazing piece of characterization, and I'm completely in awe.

The setting is just as vivid--from the hot desert sun (in particular as they're traveling through the most dangerous/arid part of the desert) to the cool greenness of England, I felt I was there.

I just can't rave enough about this book, or Kinsale's writing in general. She's never disappointed me yet. show less

Once again, Laura Kinsale writes a great non-typical romance. Lord Winter is your bored aristocrat hero who takes a commission to find a rare arabic horse in North Africa. There, he meets Selim, who is the only one left in the house of a dead English adventuress, and uses him as a guide in the desert. Adventures and dangers ensue, but I don't want to say anymore than that so I don't give the plot away. Readers of romance will recognize that the novel seems to follow the typical and overused plotlines of the genre, but Kinsale somehow is able to twist them and make them feel new. Possibly, it's because her heroine isn't a normal romance heroine, she's more of an underdog and realistic. The romance actually has a real conflict, rather show more than your normal comedy of misunderstandings. It was nice to read a romance that was actually based in the Middle East and the desert. show less

This book was pretty tense. The two main characters have a few whoppers of misunderstandings. The cross-dressing element in the book is relatively minor, and the dressed-as-a-man disguise comes off in the first fourth of the book. I did enjoy it, and it kept me up late finishing it because I was on the edge of my seat!

This was an accidental re-read, it wasn't until I was about a quarter of the way in that I realized I had read this one before. I couldn't bring myself to finish it the second time around. Zenia is such a pill, despite Kinsale's efforts to make her actions understandable.

Really 3.5 stars. There was this really cheesy part at the end and the heroine really bugged me at times.