Book Review: Day Dreamer by Jill Marie Landis

The book opens with the heroine, Celine, walking through New Orleans and and thinking to herself about what a “pleasure” it was to see the slaves and freedmen working together so efficiently.

That should have been my clue to Get The Fuck Out. Alas, hindsight.

Day Dreamer, as one might have gathered already, isn’t a book that stands up well to the test of time. Honestly, I found this 1996 publication rather more upsetting than any number of Old School “bodice rippers” I’ve had the chance to sample. Just saying. The whole time I was reading this book, I just kept thinking “why, Jill? Why are you doing this to me?” And the thing is, this book isn’t even terrible—it’s just really, really mediocre. And just all-around inane, a fact I will now demonstrate.

Jumping back to the beginning, once Celine is done waxing poetic about how much she loves slave labor, she returns to her house. Celine, by the way, is the orphaned daughter of a London whore and a roaming gypsy, and her current guardian is a gypsy fortune teller. Celine also has the Sight or somesuch psychic ability that allows her to read people’s memories/emotions when she touches them. Oh yeah: Celine has “haunting amethyst eyes.” Yup. Just in case you hadn’t already figured out she’s a Mary Sue, let’s throw some purple eyeballs into the mix. Brilliant, Jill.

Anyway. Celine returns home and discovers her guardian murdered by a lovesick client. He tries to kill, Celine, but she stabs him in self-defense and runs away. Knowing the police will be after her, Celine…goes to church. Okie-doke. Totally what I’d do. Anyway, outside the church, a girl comes running out of a carriage and drags Celine into the alleyway and then forces her to switch clothes. Why? Who knows. Anyway, this strange girl tells Celine that she has to take her place in the carriage, which Celine does because police and murder and whatnot.

The carriage takes Celine to some plantation outside the city, and even though she keeps insisting her name isn’t Jemma, she still winds up getting married posthaste to one Cordero Moreau.

So…Cordero. I wish I could say there was something interesting about this guy, but there just isn’t anything to tell. He’s the most vanilla, whitebread rendition of the Jerkwad Romance Hero. Without a doubt, you’ve read countless other books featuring him or his clones. Cordero is a Tough Man with a Tortured Past. His beloved mother died, and his wastrel father sent him to live with his evil grandfather. All his life, the only person he loved was his cousin, Alex, who died because of Cordero’s general drunken idiocy. Nowadays, Cordero is wracked with guilt and has deadened himself to all feeling because of his abandonment issues and other stupid reasons I was too bored to discover. Snore.

With that into out of the way, Cordero marries Celine within 2 seconds of meeting her, which sounds like a recipe for a complete shitshow, and you would be absolutely right! The absolute rest of Day Dreamer is a series of obscure calamities that befall the protagonists, and which are always overcome because Celine of the Purple Eyes is So Speshul. There’s a pirate attack, an attempted hanging, a hurricane, a kidnapping and murder attempt by a witch doctor, long-lost relatives returned from the grave, another attempted hanging. Don’t worry, guys. Jill has got all her bases covered.

As a backdrop to all of this nonsense, this book has a cheerful layer of: slavery! Oh yes. This book is not racially self-aware at all. Which, considering the opening scene, should have been a given. All the character make gross comments about how “slaves don’t mind the tropical heat” and their “silly” magic “fills the void in their lives” and how Cordero’s slaves are well-treated because they can grow their own vegetables and have Sundays off. Etcetera. First of all, ARE YOU SERIOUS, JILL?

Second of all, no. I’m not going to even touch all of that with a 10-foot-pole. Fuck that. 1996 wasn’t so long ago that you shouldn’t have known better than to spout that bullshit.

Okay. Where was I?

Oh. Also Jill’s writing is really bad. Super gross. I wanted to cry about how horrifying the prose was, except I was actually already crying because of the blatant racism. Some samples:

A beautiful woman in an outmoded gown danced in a luminous froth of waves on a silver sliver of sand beneath a starry sky.

and

Starlight and the sound of the sea bathed them in silver and thunder.

Hahahahahahahaha!

Why me.

Okay, just, the problem is that Day Dreamer is bad in a very dull, banal way. It’s not fun to read the way some terrible romances are. It’s just very humdrum in its poor quality. That’s all there is to it.