Liquid Silver Books, $4.75, ISBN 978-1-59578-505-3
Paranormal Romance, 2009
Hmm, is that a buffed-up Ryan Seacrest on the cover?
Bonnie Dee’s Dream across Time is a very good example of not judging a story by its imprint. This one is published under the Sterling Silver line, which means that the degree of eroticism in the story is supposed to be milder than the other offerings from the publisher, but I actually find this story far more erotic than some of the recent supposedly more erotic offerings from this publisher.
Actually, two of the three stories released so far under the Sterling Silver line are pretty erotic, come to think of it. I can only wonder whether this is because the sex scenes in those stories are far less explicit and leave more to the imagination. I find far more erotic than a very detailed sex scene describing every slotting and tabbing from points A to Z and back again, after all.
Back to the story, we have our heroine Aiyana, a Native American from a long time ago, who dreams of a lover who visits her nightly for erotic yet tender interludes. She wonders what her dreams are supposed to mean. Like Pochantos in that Disney cartoon, could it be that her true love is about to show up in her life in the near future? What she doesn’t know is that her dream lover is actually a man in our present day. Connor Baines is a present day widower who hasn’t returned to the social whirl despite the fact that his wife Helen died two years ago. He believes that those dreams are a sign that maybe it is time he moves on with life and, of course, start getting laid again. The thing is, these two are so into each other that they are starting to find it hard to meet people in their real lives and get connected with those people. How are they going to find a way to meet face-to-face?
This is an interesting story because I find myself wondering how the author is going to get those two to meet outside of the dream world. Ms Dee pulls it off in a way that is pretty satisfactory to me. For a long time, the two characters have a relationship that is erotic as well as romantic. This is pretty much what I have come to expect from this author – a romance that is both romantic as well as sexy. The two characters talk and form an emotional bond between them, so it’s not just sex-sex-sex all the time.
The ending is way too pat and requires too much of a suspension of my disbelief, though. It is unlikely that one can adapt so easily into a time and lifestyle so vastly different from one is used to, and we are talking about moving into a time and life that takes place thousands of years away from your own time, mind you. Romance is all about tidy and happy closures, but this one is way too tidy and happy for me. I’d have preferred that the story ends with the two characters meeting face to face for the first time, with the rest of their story being left to the reader’s imagination.
All in all, though, Dream across Timeis another solid read from Bonnie Dee.
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