Title: The Dream Keeper’s Daughter
Author: Emily Colin
Series: n/a
A frustrating mess with an identity crisis and unresolved plotlines
I would like to thank Emily Colin, Ballantine Books/Random House, and NetGalley for allowing me to read an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
All that follows is only my opinion and how I personally perceived the book.
*takes deep breath*
I gave myself a day to calm down, because the first time I started to write this review, there was—well, let’s just say there was a lot of attitude, and it wasn’t at all appropriate. So now I’m going to try to do this in a mature—ish—fashion.
I don’t even know where to start. I apologize if this seems disjointed at all; I’m overwhelmed with everything I want to say.
I won’t lie—I couldn’t stop reading this. I caught a few hours of sleep, but otherwise I couldn’t stop reading this book. At first, it was because I was enthralled by the mystery, wanting to figure out what on earth was going on. I was hooked all the way to about 75% through—and then I couldn’t stop reading because I simply could NOT believe the story was ending like that. I kept thinking, “No, that’s not how this is supposed to end. Someone’s going to have a revelation, and everything will be okay. Everything can still be okay.”
That’s life in a nutshell right there. Your entire life, you retain hope that things will work out the way you want them to, will work out for the best.
And then they don’t, and you’re left thinking, “What was the point?”
What WAS the point of this book?
I want to give credit where it’s due—Colin’s got a lot of education under her belt, and it’s apparent. I had to look up several words, and all the papers she’s undoubtedly written taught her how to structure excellent sentences and paragraphs. The writing style, in the most mechanical sense, was professional and impressive, which lent it a literary-fiction vibe. And the research she must have done—her acknowledgments were three Kindle pages long, in the smallest print! She wrote as though she had first-hand experience with every topic she mentioned. I have nothing but respect for that level of hard work and dedication. That’s why I gave two stars instead of one.
But this story was crap. I can’t talk about it without spoilers—or raising my blood pressure—so here’s your warning.
This book wanted to be everything at once—women’s fiction, literary fiction, romance, fantasy, mystery, historical fiction—and without genre tethering its focus, it was a mess. I have no idea what the story was actually trying to achieve. Everything in Isabel’s viewpoint held the tone of women’s fiction. The mystery was present for the first two-thirds or so. The fantasy elements were more important in the beginning, as we discovered Finn’s abilities and realized Max had time-traveled, then didn’t matter at all toward the end. Max’s point-of-view in the middle was pretty much historical fiction. And then the last quarter threw all that away, completely disregarded it all, leaving plotlines unresolved, and turned it into an infuriating romance that made me want to vomit.
The supernatural elements, which were the backbone of the plot, were never explained or given rules. Julia was back in time for a year, but it was six years in real life. Max goes back in time for two weeks, and eight real years go by. According to Julia’s timetable, two months would equal one real year, so Max should only have been gone for three real months. So why eight years? If it was just to place the present where Colin wanted it, so that Isabel could make the decisions she does, that’s incredibly lazy storytelling. Also, did Julia and Max age at all with their traveling? Did they return looking appropriately older, or did they return in the same condition they left? And why did all of the dreams and weird communication happen when they did? The occurrences were spread out over two weeks for Max, right? So shouldn’t they have happened few and far between for Isabel and Finn throughout the eight years? Why did they all happen in the same time-frame as Max, though time isn’t moving parallel? Did he just float around in limbo for eight years, then the powers that be decided to let everything finally happen? And what explanation was there for the Thin Space in the Adairs’ woods? All we were told is that the Adairs’ Scottish ancestors believed such areas existed all over the world. How did Robert Adair find it? And why was he the one who “lured” Max into the past? Why did he wait to “lure” Max when he did? And what had his life been like? Did he ever try to go back himself? Why did Julia and Max have to do the dirty work?
There’s so much I don’t understand! What was the point of any of it if you weren’t going to give meaning to any of it? You just made the things you wanted to happen, happen, with no rhyme or reason? No. That’s not how it works. Just because it’s fiction, just because it’s supernatural, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have to make sense.
What explanation and boundaries were there for Finn’s abilities? She could read minds, she could read emotions, she knew the future, she could communicate with people lost in time, sometimes through dreams, sometimes not? And only at opportune moments, of course. What else could she do? And how? Mystical blood was suggested in passing but then nothing more was said about it. Were her abilities particularly strong because she got Adair blood through both her parents? On that revelation, did they ever tell anyone about the Brightmore baby actually being an Adair? Did they have enough proof? What were the ramifications of that discovery? And it still feels somewhat creepy that Max and Isabel turned out to be distant cousins. I wish I could see that family tree Julia had worked so hard to trace; maybe actually seeing how many people separated them, diluting the Adair blood, would make me feel better.
Finn and Max were the only two characters I liked. They were the only ones who tried to fix anything, who saw beyond themselves and wanted to make others happy. Everyone else had a woe-is-me complex. Now, I know tragedies occurred, so they were entitled to some self-pity, but it seemed like they were all trying to one-up each other on who was more devastated and who was more effed up by their past traumas. Eventually I was so disgusted with the lot of them that I just went numb to it all.
Isabel was one of the most arrogant, selfish, and entitled characters I’ve ever read. I borderline hated her. She made everything about herself. Oh, woe is me, I can’t wallow in unrequited love and abandonment issues anymore because my mother and the man I love have miraculously come back from the dead. Oh, woe is me, men won’t stop falling in love with me even though I completely ignore them with the excuse that I’m still in love with my first boyfriend. Oh, woe is me, my gifted daughter is ridiculously well-adjusted despite it all. Oh, what am I to do?
Boo-fricken-hoo.
Ryan was pouty and immature. Every time he opened his mouth, I imagined myself pointing at the door and saying, GTFO. He didn’t need to be in this book, not if it had focused on the time-traveling and supernatural plots. His only purpose was to conflict Isabel in her romantic women’s fiction storyline. There still could have been tension between her and Max when he got home, but they should have worked it out without Ryan complicating things further. Their sex scenes broke my heart, made me actually feel ill, because it felt so utterly wrong.
Then I remember I don’t like Isabel. Max definitely deserves better than her. So Ryan can go ahead and cloud her judgment with a woman’s greatest folly—the notion that she can fix a man with love. Or, in my opinion, fix a man with guilt, pity, and obligation disguised as love. I think they should go off to New York and leave Finn with Max.
So yeah, Isabel and Ryan end up together. For eight years, she’s pretends to still be hung up on Max—why, I have no idea—living in her own little world where her emotions are the only ones that matter, completely oblivious to how much Ryan loves her and wants her. Then Max comes back, and after all that time, she decides she’s not interested in him anymore. She rips his heart out of his chest, throws it on the ground, crushes it beneath her heal, spits on it—and then flounces off to New York with Ryan.
It’s like… It’s like Max was her favorite toy, and then one day she lost it. She looked everywhere, did everything she could to find it. All other toys paled in comparison, because they weren’t her favorite one. And that mentality stuck for a long time, even after she’d gotten new toys and found one she really liked. It didn’t replace her favorite, nothing could, but it was fun. And then one day, she finds her favorite toy…and after a brief moment of elation, realizes it’s not as cool as she remembered. It’s old and dirty and used. She doesn’t want it to belong in her life anymore; it’s not good enough. She decides she likes the other one better, and throws her old favorite toy away.
I’m so bloody furious thinking about it that I want to hurl my computer across the room.
How dare she? How dare Isabel disregard the world and everyone in it, then get angry and flustered when it smacks her in the face and demands some respect? I don’t think Max’s perspective ever fully registered with her—that he’d only been gone a couple of weeks, and comes back to find he’s missed watching his daughter grow up, and that the woman he loves, the woman he’d wanted to marry, can’t stand to be near him. Plus he probably had a bit of PTSD from his time in 1816, and he was still coming to grips with everything that had happened there. But none of that mattered to her; it was as if she no longer saw Max as a real person, just a figment of her past with no import on her present or future. She focused instead on getting Ryan to stop whining.
You know what, Ryan? You’re a masochistic moron. You’re in love with a woman for eight years, and you never work up the friggin balls to talk to her about it? Your entire adult life, you cower behind the excuse of your traumatic childhood, and then expect me to respect you, coddle you? A strong man would have come to terms with it, would have risen above it, but no, you allowed it to hold you back and rot you from the inside out. If Max hadn’t come back, would you have ever told Isabel how you felt? But Max does come back, and you realize you’ve missed your chance, missed eight years’ worth of chances, and throw a tantrum. You’ve always kept your distance, then when another man finally threatens to take them away, you clutch them to your chest and holler, “Mine!” Isabel doesn’t love you. She was supposed to be with Max. But because you threw a fit, and because you’d been instrumental in Finn’s happy childhood, she makes herself into a consolation prize out of gratitude. And she’s psychotic enough to convince herself it’s the right thing to do.
I’m not saying Isabel wasn’t allowed to fall out of love and move on with her life. Eight years is a long time. She grew up and turned into a independent woman. She even said herself at the beginning that she’d stopped thinking about Max. So then why did she become obsessed with him, claiming she still loved him, when she thought he was trying to communicate with her? Did she think she was supposed to? If she was as over him as she’d come to believe, she would have gone to a therapist and wondered what her subconscious was trying to tell her. But no, she stubbornly insisted she was perfectly sane and wallowed anew in unrequited love until Max was standing before her…and she realized, yeah, she really was over him.
It just— It made no sense. The ideas and theories presented could have sounded logical and reasonable if written correctly, but not here. I didn’t buy anything I read here. Everything Isabel did and thought was cheap and reactionary—on purpose, because for the most part, she was propelling the plot—as it were.
What was sad was, during that last quarter, it was almost as if Colin knew the story was circling the drain. I couldn’t even follow all the psychological twists and turns she pushed Isabel through to justify the destination. It seemed like she was desperate to make it sound plausible that Isabel should choose Ryan. Didn’t work. It reeked of bullshit.
And the most frustrating part? Despite all Isabel and Ryan’s proclamations of loving Finn, that Finn was all that mattered, that they didn’t want to hurt her—they never once, NEVER ONCE, in the entire book, asked her for her opinion. Not if she wanted to go to camp, not if she wanted Ryan to be her daddy, not if she liked Max, not if she wanted to move to New York. Arrogant, selfish pricks.
And the actual end was terribly abrupt. I have no idea why Colin ended it like that. Did she think it was a stylistic/artistic thing to do, just cutting it off like that? It might have been, if anything had been resolved, but nothing had, so the abrupt cut-off was just an abrupt cut-off.
I have so many questions!!!
So Max and Finn go to Barbados to help him try to find his balance. Does he? Find his balance, I mean? What happens after that? Does he ever go back in time again, in general? Does he open his own greenhouse? Does he find a woman to fall in love with who won’t abandon him? Does he make up for lost time with Finn? Does he do more research into the whole time-traveling thing, or will he not approach the topic again with a ten-foot pole?
What happened to Andrew and Julia’s relationship? They completely fell off the radar. Am I just supposed to assume they picked up right where they left off, like nothing had happened and no time had passed? Then why on earth was that course of action so unacceptable for Max and Isabel? They could change, but Andrew and Julia couldn’t? What if either of them had moved on? They’d been apart for fourteen years, not just eight.
Did I understand correctly that Finn’s full name was Finnish? Not Finnegan, Finley, Finnia, or even Finnbar? I don’t remember another one being mentioned. Unless her name is just Finn, period, and Isabel was teasing when she called her Finnish? But if her full name is Finnish, does it have any significance? Also, was she born prematurely? Max said it was March when they created Finn, and Isabel told him she was pregnant in May, so she couldn’t have been more than six or eight weeks along, according to him. But Finn tells him her birthday is in October, so Isabel would have had her when she was only somewhere between seven and eight months along. Isabel said her pregnancy was rocky, but otherwise never mentioned any difficulty in having Finn. So was it a continuity error on Colin’s part, or did she not utilize that detail?
Another error – The night that Isabel sees Max on her patio, it’s storming. Hard. I would assume that means there’s cloud cover, right? Then how would she have seen him by the light of the “big moon”? She makes the observation that he hadn’t set off her security light and the only reason she saw him was because of the bright moonlight. Doubtful. I’m not sure how much distance separated them, physically, but it would have been better to say that the light from the kitchen shining outside had illuminated him.
I’m curious about Max’s parents. It was suggested that they had relationship issues, that perhaps Mr. Adair had cheated on Jennifer. I kind of wanted to know more about that.
I was also curious to know more about Hannah. Max thought his three- or four-times great grandfather had raped one of his slaves and produced Hannah, but it was never mentioned again. He never asked about it, and Hannah never mentioned possibly being his relative. Not that I expected them to have a casual chat about it, but… I don’t know. I just wanted to know more.
Oh—don’t get attached to the grad students in the beginning. The only one of them who had anything to do was Jake, and his only purpose was to fawn over Isabel and stroke her ego. Why they were given any significance at all is beyond me.
Seriously, who edited this book?
And finally – Why is it titled The Dream Keeper’s Daughter?? No one was ever called a dream-keeper. The term was never used in the book! No one ever tried to figure out how they were having the strange dreams/visions, or what they meant. They just happened. Besides, who is the title referring to, Isabel or Finn? Or hell, it could be referring to the Adair baby that the Brightmore’s stole. It’s a whimsical, intriguing title, but it makes no sense.
Okay, this is freakishly long, maybe the longest review I’ve written, and I’ve given myself a massive headache thinking it through. There’s so much more I could rant about, but I’m done. If you pick up this book, you might enjoy it for the first little while…but I guarantee you, if you don’t get fed up in the first three quarters, the last one will make you as mutinous as I was.
