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43 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Winter, as in "cold" - Duh!, April 12, 2005
It seems to me that reviewers are missing the central source of conflict in this clever romance with literary aspirations. In a nutshell, the hero and heroine are polar opposites. Kinsale offers plenty of symbols and metaphors to convey this:
1. The hero's name is "Winter" - he is cold, emotionally withdrawn from other humans - and (paradoxically) drawn to landscapes of hot, arid emptiness. Zenia, meanwhile, has lived her entire life under the scorching desert sun. She longs for the cool, lush gardens of England, and paradoxically, the warmth of human contact.
2. More conflict stems from the enormous material differences in the life experiences of the two principles: Winter has always possessed social power and wealth; ergo, they mean nothing to him; Zenia has always lived a powerless and materially deprived existence. She longs for financial security, basic creature comforts and certainty about what the next day will bring. That she transforms herself from a Bedouin boy into a proper English lady at the earliest opportunity is perfectly logical. Readers who find English-Zenia tedious or bitchy misunderstand her character completely by assuming that she, like Winter, should see life as one jolly adventure.
3. Then there is the East-West difference. Zenia's worldview, we are told and shown, is essentially oriental: she is deeply superstitious, fearful of curses, genies, etc. Winter is a man of science, a product of European enlightenment. It is not hard to understand why Zenia and he might not see eye-to-eye on basic things.
Why does she hold him at arm's length, despite the best counsel of everyone around her, despite her own feelings for him, despite his obviously sincere and honorable courtship? Because she recognizes that they come from two different worlds; she doesn't trust him to settle down in England and be the kind of husband/father that she needs him to be. She cannot contemplate going back to the isolated, hand-to-mouth, nomadic existence that she knew before reaching England; and she believes (with reason) that Winter is incapable of changing from wanderer to couch potato, no matter what he says.
Looked at this way, the wonder isn't that Zenia holds out against Winter as long as she does, but that she yields to him at all.
Kinsale is a fine writer. And like most fine writers, she rewards the reader who takes the trouble to ponder her meaning. The Dream Hunter is a book that actually deserves to be reread, offering nuances of character, narrative structure and plot to the careful reader.
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27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Note on Character, July 6, 2001
By A Customer
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.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
lovely, December 4, 2002
I've read through the reviews, and do understand why some people may not like the book as much -- we are so used to both characters all ready for love and with totally secure attachment styles. however, real life is not like that, many people (and I'm sure readers can identify with this) grow up with pretty messed up atachment styles -- we want so much to be loved, but are so scred ot rejection or being hurt as well. I loved this book because the characters are human -- you understand why they do what they do (they at consistently... unlike some other characters I've read who *suddenly* change in the middle of the story), even if you ache for them or don't necessarily agree with their choices.
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