Book Review: In Your Dreams, Holden Rhodes by Stephanie Archer

‘In Your Dreams, Holden Rhodes’ is the third of Stephanie Archer’s Queen’s Cove series, it was released in 2022. It is available to read, along with the rest of the series via Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited subscription. This book follows Holden, the second-born Rhodes, reclusive, reserved, and a hopeless romantic, as he seeks to find his match.

Sadie Waters is down on her luck, after falling victim to a heartbreaking romance fraud, she is in way over her head with debt, and after the death of her aunt, Katherine, a pillar of the Queen’s Cove community, Sadie leaves Toronto to pay her respects, attend the funeral and hear the reading of the will.

In her will, Katherine left Sadie her legacy, the inn she ran in Queen’s Cove. Too bad the inn isn’t only just in her name. It also belongs to none other than Holden Rhodes, attractive, single, successful businessman who Sadie happens to have had a crush on once upon a time.

This story has a strangers to friends to lovers dynamic and explores the value of marriage as an institution. There were a lot of laughs, and I loved the running joke of a cursed sex toy that just can’t stop following Sadie around. It eased her into the community and made her feel accepted and in on a joke, drawing her out of her shell, not dissimilarly to how Hannah and Wyatt’s sex-capades in the woods did in the previous book.

Although I really enjoyed this book, I found that the ending was probably less favourable. I knew from the moment Holden, like his brothers before him, what requesting a turn with his father’s car would mean, and I wasn’t particularly impressed with how everything else came to be. I would have loved this book to be far longer, and really dwell on the anguish that came from Holden being so selfish and idealistic, although he had good intentions. I would have loved more conflict and friction between Holden and Sadie as they tried to navigate a relationship after a huge hurdle like that.

I felt like elements of the character development were rushed and I would have loved even more time to see Sadie find her feet in the community as an outsider, and grow in confidence, and although the fluff and the friends-with-benefits solution to their chemistry was great, I wanted more. I wanted more nuanced growth, not just the leaps and bounds, but simple things. Things that could be overlooked.

That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy the book, no, I did! But, I wanted more from it. I hope that we we get to see more of the world of Queen’s Cove, the characters, their growth and their shifting dynamics etc. in the final book of Archer’s series.