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Title: Dreaming of You
Author: Lisa Kleypas
Publication Year: 1994
Sub-genre: Historical
Content Warning: I mean, there’s a lot. Murder, assault, cheating, to name a few.
Confession time: Before Dreaming of You, I’d only ever picked up two Lisa Kleypas books. One I didn’t love. And the other I couldn’t even finish. Cue the gasps. I’ve said this before and I will say it again, I didn’t read romance consistently until recently, and the only reason I’m choosing to read some of these older books is because I want to have a well-rounded education in the genre I’m currently writing. And I was reeeeaaallly reluctant to read this one because of some problems I’ve had with Kleypas’s books in the past, and also because I know Derek Craven is a tough hero.
(Spoilers ahead) Derek Craven appears in at least one book before this one (pretty sure it’s the one I DNFed). He’s the owner of a gambling club, came from a life of nothing, and has made himself incredibly wealthy. Sara is a young writer who lives in the country with her parents. She is spending some time in London to research her new book. She happens upon Derek getting beat up in some alley, pulls out her pistol, and shoots one of the guys assaulting him. Derek then takes her back to his club and Sara decides she is going to spend time at the club to complete her research. The employees of the club immediately fall in love with her (they loved her previous book) and bend over backwards to make her happy. Derek is immediately attracted to her, and tries to avoid her as much as he can. A lot of stuff goes down. Sara ends up going back home, where she is semi-engaged to a bore of a man with a terrible mother. She now knows this tedious relationship isn’t going to work for her (because she’s in love with Derek) and calls it all off. One of the sex workers from Derek’s club comes to see her and tells her that Derek slept with her (my interpretation anyway) because she looks like Sara, and he called her Sara the whole time, and clearly he loves her. Derek and Sara get thrown together again at a ball held by one of their mutual friends. They decide to get married. Everything is chill until one of Derek’s ex-lovers comes along, threatens Sara and burns down the club. Sara saves herself from this woman, makes her way back to Derek, and they live happily ever after.
Okay. I went into this book thinking I was going to hate everything about it. I was only going to read it because everyone in romancelandia has an opinion about Derek Craven, and I felt like I needed to do my due diligence. And I…didn’t hate this book. I might even have liked this book? Don’t get me wrong, there are tons of problems, but I do love me a broken hero and Derek Craven is about as broken as they come. I thought the relationship and genuine love between he and Sara was almost perfect, and I wasn’t as bothered by the whole sleeping with a girl who looks like you thing as I thought I might have been. A couple of things did really bother me though. One, in the opening pages of the book, Sara kills a man. And this event is pretty much never brought up or addressed again in the rest of the 400 pages that follow. She KILLED someone. A person doesn’t just shoot a guy on the street and walk away without having some issues from it (whether he deserved it or not). The other main thing I have an issue with is the ex-lover. Her whole I’m going to kill this woman because she married the man I was boning was not my favorite plot line. I’m kind of over the whole woman goes crazy because she can’t handle rejection plot device. Yes, I realize this was written in 1994, but it’s one of the things that made it hard for me to really, truly love this book.
The other issue that proves problematic is the treatment of the sex workers in the book. The upside is that Derek provides the women with a safe place to work without acting as their pimp. He gives them security without taking a cut of their earnings, which was awesome. However, there is definitely this line between them and Sara, like Sara is above them because she is not a sex worker (even though she wrote about one in her first book, which is the one everyone loved). Sara takes a bit of a moral high ground with them (at first) despite having spent a lot of time with another group of sex workers when she was researching her first book. She’s not outwardly judgey, but there’s some inward judgement, for sure.
With all that being said, the love story here is lovely enough for me to get over those things. I’m just a sucker for the hero who can never open himself up to love until the heroine comes along and changes everything for him. It worked for me (and I was surprised that it did). I’m not going to ever stan Derek Craven, but I get why people love this book.
Overall Rating: 4 stars
Are you a Derek Craven stan? What do you love about him?