Dream on by Jennifer Hartmann

 Dream On

by Jennifer Hartmann

My Rating: 🟊🟊🟊🟊🟊

Spice Rating: 🌶🌶

Blurb:

Jennifer Hartmann presents an all-new standalone crossover romance filled with heartache and dreams.

Lexington Hall and I were never supposed to collide—he, the golden boy of Hollywood, and me, a small-town dreamer with stars in my eyes. But when we shared the stage in our high school musical, something ignited.

Then, just as quickly, it all fell apart, leaving my dreams in pieces.

Now, four years later, Lex is a household name, turning our past into a television sensation. He's spun our story for the world to see, while I'm still haunted by what we lost.

With millions obsessed over the "real" Stevie St. James, Lex reappears with an offer too tempting to turn a fake romance to keep the buzz alive, in exchange for the financial freedom I desperately need.

I convince myself I can play the part. But as old feelings resurface and new risks emerge, the line between fiction and reality begins to blur.

Dreams are easy to chase—but falling for the guy who shattered mine could cost me everything.

My Review:

Let me start this review with a confession and a warning all rolled into one. I am absolutely, completely, and without any shame whatsoever obsessed with everything Jennifer Hartmann writes. I do not know what she puts in these books. I genuinely cannot explain it. Some kind of literary witchcraft, some secret ingredient that she sprinkles into every single page that makes it completely impossible to walk away unscathed. She reaches directly into your chest, wraps her hand around your heart, and rips it clean out. And then, while you are sitting there devastated and wrecked and wondering how you will ever recover, she smiles, hands you another book with just as much trauma packed inside it, and you take it. Every single time you take it. Because you cannot help yourself. Because she is just that good.

So when I tell you that Dream On felt slightly different from her usual gut punch of destruction, please understand that I mean that in the most relative way possible. Compared to the emotional demolition derby that Jennifer Hartmann usually puts me through, this one had a softer edge to it. This was a summer read through and through. It was warm and it was full of feeling and it wrapped around you like a breeze on a long afternoon rather than knocking you completely off your feet. But do not for one single second think that means it did not deliver the feels, because it absolutely did. Jennifer Hartmann is constitutionally incapable of writing something that does not make you feel deeply. It is simply not in her DNA.

What she does better than almost any other author I have ever read is write trauma in a way that feels devastatingly real. Not performative, not dramatic for the sake of drama, but genuinely, achingly human. When you are inside one of her stories you do not feel like a reader sitting at a safe distance. You feel like you have been transported directly into the heart of it. You feel what her characters feel in your own chest, in your own bones. I am completely serious when I say that her characters feel real to me. I do not know where they exist in the universe but I think about them and I genuinely hope they are okay. I hope they are out there somewhere healing and finding their way. That is the kind of writing Jennifer Hartmann does. She makes you care on a level that defies the fact that these are fictional people on a printed page.

Dream On follows two people who could not have come from more different worlds. Different backgrounds, different upbringings, different ways of moving through life and processing pain. And yet fate, or the universe, or whatever name you want to give to that invisible force that pulls people together when they need each other most, throws them into the same orbit. One of them is carrying so much agony that they have shut down almost entirely, built walls so high and so thick that the light can barely get through. And the other one refuses to look away. The other one shows up, stays present, and slowly, tenderly shows what love and healing could actually look like if you are brave enough to let them in.

And just when you think you can see where this is going, just when your heart starts to feel the tiniest bit safe, something tragic happens. They grow apart. The distance between them becomes something neither of them knows how to cross. And you sit there with the book in your hands feeling the loss of it as if it happened to someone you actually know.

But this is Jennifer Hartmann, and she does not leave you in the rubble forever. They find each other again. And when they do, everything is different. They are different. Changed by time and pain and everything that happened in between. And yet somehow, underneath all of it, they are exactly the same. The same two people who found each other once and could not stay away for long.

I was heartbroken reading this. I cried ugly tears, the kind that sneak up on you and refuse to be dignified about it. And I loved every single second of it.