Lakota Dreaming, by Constance Gillam

Book one

Since my first choice for this month’s TBR Challenge was a resounding failure, I’m giving this ARC by an entirely new-to-me author a try: the heroine has just been fired, and is taking the “opportunity” to travel from New York to a reservation in South Dakota.

Beware: HFN, magical Native Americans, swearing, racism, equating evil with mental health issues.

Lakota Dreaming, by Constance Gillam

Zora Hugues is having a rather bad life right at the moment.

For years, she’s had dreams of another time, dreams that feel like someone else’s memories, far in the past; a Black woman living among Lakota Sioux. As the dreams come with increasing frequency, they take a toll on her waking life, until eventually they cost her the job she loves, and at which she has excelled for over half a decade.

So, in a “nothing ventured, nothing gained” kind of moment, she decides to visit the Little River Reservation in South Dakota (see footnote ¹), to find out whether there is any historical record of the person in her dreams.

Before she can even get where she’s going, however, she has a less than felicitous meeting with John Iron Hawk, the captain of the tribal police, who isn’t particularly keen about having a reporter from New York writing gog knows what awful slant about the reservation and his people. It’s bad enough having tourists coming in to gamble at the casino, apparently pouring money in that never makes it to the tribe’s coffers, without a big city woman bringing in bad publicity.

But Zora has little to lose and not much to go back to, and soon a battle of will ensues.

Here’s the book’s blurb:

Her visions brought her here. Her heart tells her to stay. But someone dangerous wants her gone…

Zora Hughes is haunted by someone else’s past. Plagued by dreams of her ancestor fleeing captivity, the former NYC fashion editor travels to South Dakota to uncover the truth. And until she can put her visions to rest, she won’t let anyone stand in her way… not even the handsome captain of the local tribal police. John Iron Hawk is on a mission to clean up his reservation. Trying to raise a teenage daughter on his own while working to expose a corrupt casino manager means he has little time for nonsense. But for reasons he can’t explain, he finds himself irresistibly drawn to the gorgeous New Yorker stirring up trouble. As Zora’s search collides with John’s investigation, unearthing an old secret could have deadly consequences. Threatened by a ruthless enemy, Zora and John may have to find a key to her past to unlock their new future…

Published in 2014, this is the first book on a trilogy of a self-published contemporary romantic suspense trilogy that follows the same two main characters, with a historical prequel about the heroine’s ancestors released between books one and two.

I can find very little about the author; her website exists at the time of writing, but it doesn’t even mention that she was a Golden Heart finalist in 2008 (I got that from her author’s note at the end of the book), and it would seem that she’s no longer writing, or at least not under this name.

There are the bones of a decent story here, even if the premise leans a bit too much on the “mystical Native Americans” trope, with its undertones of racism; an experienced writer could have woven the multitude of plot threads, backstories, conflicts and motivations crammed into just over 300 pages, into something cohesive and internally consistent, or perhaps cut some elements entirely.

The florid writing voice certainly didn’t help. Zora’s legs aren’t weak, they are “overcooked spaguetti”; she doesn’t fall, she “free falls”, and she “grimace(s) at the eau the toilette of her own sweat.” Then there’s this passage:

“A flush the color of an overripe promegranate flooded Emma’s face. She opened and closed her mouth like a hooked salmon.” (Chapter 7)

On top of which, the characterizations of the protagonists are rudimentary, clumsy; I could almost see the checkmarks on the genre romance list: they meet, they rub each other wrong, but they are attracted to each other, check. They are forced to spend some time together, sparks fly, check. There’s a misunderstanding, they pull apart, check. Have to spend time together anyway, time for them to have sex, check. And so on, right down to the last act separation and literal last paragraph reunion.

The secondary characters are basically stereotypes: the troubled teenage daughter, the protective older sister, the mystical grandfather, the bitter shallow other woman, the sleazy womanizer. To top it all off, the author makes sure to tie evil with mental health issues, which further soured the reading experience.

This came close to being another DNF; as it is, I skimmed a lot during the second half. I read through the end hoping for the answer to a specific plothtread which is, alas, left dangling entirely.

Lakota Dreaming gets 5.00 out of 10

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¹ Not an actual reservation; there is a Little White River in South Dakota, which passes from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to the Rosebud Indian Reservation.