The Dream Hunter

Rating:
Summary: VERY annoying heroine!
Review: Ok, let me start out by saying that this story by itself was satisfactory, nothing earth-shattering, but not terrible, either. And the hero, Viscount Winter? A wonderful character, very easy to love. Now the heroine, Zenia (what kind of name is that anyway?)? A total witch! (or more precisely a word that rhymes with it and starts with B) She absolutely treated the hero like *crap*. I've read about few characters as self-centered and whiny as she. Throughout the whole book, all she thought about was herself and what *she* wants and needs. She didn't appreciate the hero at all. I mean, the guy practically worshipped her!... And it's not as if Winter treated her badly in any way... he was *so* nice and loving thru out the book. I can't believe people say Laura Kinsale's books are so good. This one and the last one I read, Uncertain Magic, are making me think twice about ever getting another one by her. I'll admit near the end of The Dream Hunter, I was so furious at the heroine's behavior, I had to stop reading to calm myself,lol. One last time: I absolutely hated the heroine!

Rating:
Summary: A Note on Character
Review: This is one of my favorite books, but then I spent 10 years in the Middle East, and have a particular thing for those intrepid Victorian explorers, the ladies like Isabelle Earnhardt and Hester Stanhope, and the Burton/Spekes types. A variation on that theme was right up my alley in a way it might not be for a generic reader… A lot of these reviews mention characterization, but what satisfies some readers/Amazon reviewers as laudable character development in this genre, rarely approaches the basic literary minimum. ... The story in The Dream Hunter is propelled by the biographies of the characters. This is always true in a Kinsale novel, even when her plots sometimes fail to congeal. So, for example, I found the mother and father of Winter to be extremely affecting – the mother is presented as so emotionally detached as to be among the walking dead, but in the course of exposition it is revealed that her detachment might be a reasonable adaptation to the losses in her life. The parents’ attempts to cocoon their only child to survive to adulthood, were mis-choices made out of love. Ultimately their parenting style created the very sort of son they feared the most: one of these Victorian adventure-travelers. It seems inevitable that Winter would become a (shy & awkward) thrill-seeking wanderer, if only in reaction to his parents’ zero-risk form of caring. And I think Winter wanders because of his own innate sense of outsider-ness, which is only appropriate in a foreign location, but can be very isolating in one’s own setting. There are some who have not been able to relate to Zenia. I found her actions to be internally consistent. Having been born into extremely dysfunctional circumstances, and raised (trans-genderly?) among the Bedu, she developed the childhood fantasy, a coping strategy, that she was really an English lady, with an English father who would welcome and rescue her, if only she could get to him. If only her somewhat deranged, all-powerful mother would not prevent her. It is true that she does have a hard time recognizing a conventional pair-bond when it presents itself, some readers have found that annoying. But for all his social awkwardness, Winter did grow up in an intact two-parent household; Zenia, however, was brought up loving and fearing her legendary mother. Zenia is only replicating the world as she has experienced it when she thinks to raise her daughter without benefit of father. She can’t really imagine a role for Winter in the mother-daughter bond. And never having had a “normal” male-female relationship modeled to her – how should she react to Winter’s (not entirely benign) overtures except with prudent caution? I’m sure she would be pleased to discover that people interpreted her actions as springing from an emasculating sense of power (“Zenia calling all the shots” as one reviewer here put it) – when actually the search for love and security propel her decisions. What I like best in this novel is that everybody’s motivations are so human, so compensatory and pathetic – everyone acts out of their deepest need for love and connection – even when they do horrendous things. There are no one-dimensional characters here, only readers who have failed to perceive their complexity.