Book Review | Dream Girl Drama by Tessa Bailey

Jan 29

If you’re thinking about checking out Dream Girl Drama yourself, don’t worry about spoilers. The first part of my reviews are always spoiler-free so you can see if the book is your cup of tea. After a quick summary and a basic review, I’ll give a spoiler warning and do a deep dive into everything I loved and hated about Dream Girl Drama.

Tessa Bailey is a #1 New York Times Bestselling author, with her breakout hit being It Happened One Summer, about a spoiled socialite sent off to a remote fishing town in hopes she might rehab her life and find some purpose. That book is just one half of the Bellinger Sisters series. I enjoyed both of those books, and they’re a big reason I keep trying out books by Tessa Bailey, despite not really enjoying Fangirl Down or Unfortunately Yours.

According to her HarperCollins profile, “If you want sexy, heartfelt, humorous romance with a guaranteed happy ending, you’ve come to the right place.”

Book Cover: Dream Girl Drama by Tessa Bailey

Content Warning

I always like to give a quick content warning for any sensitive topics. These are some content warnings for book:

Abuse
Blood
Divorce
Sexually explicit scenes

Quick Synopsis

Usually, I’ll write the synopsis for a book myself, but since I didn’t actually finish this book, I’m going to steal a synopsis from Bookshop.org, where you can go to support small, independent stores while book shopping. (This is the description that’s available across sites selling the book.)

When professional hockey player Sig Gauthier’s car breaks down and his phone dies, he treks into a posh private country club to call a tow truck, where he encounters the alluring Chloe Clifford, the manic pixie dream girl who captivates him immediately with her sense of adventure and penchant for stealing champagne.

Sparks fly during a moonlight kiss and the enamored pair can’t wait to see each other again, but when Sig finally arrives to meet his dad’s new girlfriend over dinner, Chloe is confusingly also there. Turns out the girlfriend is Chloe’s mother. Oh, and they’re engaged.

Sig’s dream girl is his future stepsister.

Though the pair is now wary of being involved romantically, Chloe, a sheltered harp prodigy, yearns to escape her controlling mother. Sig promises to teach her the ins and outs of independence in Boston—but not inside his bedroom. They both know there can never be more than friendship between a famous hockey player and his high-society, soon-to-be stepsister. But keeping their relationship platonic grows harder amid the developing family drama, especially knowing they were meant for so much more…

My Rating

Everybody has to come up with their own system for judging and rating books, and here’s mine:

One star: I couldn’t finish the book. (DNF)
Two stars: I struggled to finish, but I did.
Three stars: This book was okay and worth reading.
Four stars: I liked this book and I would recommend it to a friend.
Five stars: I’d read this book again, and it’s going on my favorites shelf.

Dream Girl Drama gets a one-star from me because I just couldn’t get myself to finish the book. I’ve really enjoyed Tessa Bailey books in the past, including It Happened One Summer and Secretly Yours. This one just was not for me.

My Recommendations

If you read Dream Girl Drama and enjoyed it, these are some other titles you may enjoy:

As someone who wasn’t a big fan of Dream Girl Drama, but really enjoyed It Happened One Summer, I figured I’d go ahead and recommend it. If Dream Girl Drama is your first Tessa Bailey, you might even like her other works better. This one is my second favorite of hers, but by far her most popular book—and for good reason. It features a fun bar rehab, good character development, and a strong, little-town-by-the-sea vibe I just can’t get enough of.

It Happened One Summer by Tessa Bailey

Secretly Yours is another Tessa Bailey that I thought was perfectly enjoyable, and in fact I think it’s my favorite book by her. This one is about a messy gardener and a perfectionist. It takes place on a vineyard, which gives it plenty of pretty scenery to describe. For some reason, I’m always a sucker with romance books that involve flowers, so here it is.

Secretly Yours by Tessa Bailey

Not Another Love Song by Julie Soto

Because I’m not a big fan of the love at first sight thing, I don’t have a lot of books to recommend that feature that trope. I do, however, think Not Another Love Song might help you to scratch that same itch. In this one, our love interest Xander is dominant and pretty obsessed with Gwen. You may enjoy that if you were a fan of Sig’s personality.

Summary

We’re now entering the spoiler-y part of this review. If you think book sounds like your cup of tea, click away, read it, and come back to see if you agree or disagree with my critique. If you like the sound of the book but you don’t want to read it, don’t worry, I’ll give you the full rundown.

SPOILERS

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SPOILERS -

This is the first time I’ve DNF’ed a book I was planning to review, so I’m just going to provide a quick summary of the first third of the book, which is about as far as I made it.

Sig Gauthier is a professional hockey player, on the way to have dinner with his flaky dad and his new wealthy girlfriend. This is something his dad does—finding wealthy women and conning them out of their money. Because Sig is in the rich part of town, when he breaks down, it’s at a country club.

The staff at the country club aren’t that interested in letting him to make a phone call or charge his phone, but Chloe Clifford comes to his rescue, pretending to know him and helping him into the club.

Sig falls in love with Chloe the moment that he first sees her, taking note of her thighs and skirt. The two of them hit it off, and when we switch to Chloe’s perspective, we see that she’s just as enamored with him, even when he insists on holding the champagne to her lips instead of letting her drink it herself.

Chloe admits that she’s been wanting to go to Boston to study music. She’s a harpist and a prodigy, and we see that her mother keeps her pretty under lock and key.

The two of them head out into the grass and start making out, getting handsy pretty fast. Then Chloe remembers she has somewhere to be—and she has to go. But not before giving Sig her number and promising to continue their kiss (and more) later.

But, of course, when Sig arrives at the lavish estate to meet his father and his new girlfriend, who does he find but Chloe and her mother. Sig and Chloe are both shocked, and even more so when Chloe’s mother announces that she and Sig’s father are getting married.

This would make them step-siblings, and they find that weird. Chloe announces that she’s going to Boston with Sig then, at the table. When the dinner is over—and Sig’s father has warned him to stay away from Chloe—they take off for Boston.

Sig pays for everything, putting Chloe up in a hotel and paying the rent for her apartment. The two of them spend all their time together, and since they’ll legally be step-siblings when their parents marry, they do their best to ignore their physical attraction, but there are still plenty of intense moments between the two.

Chloe goes to Sig’s hockey games, and he teaches her how to do her laundry. This is just about where I stopped reading the book—when Sig comes into Chloe’s apartment to find that she’s made him a birthday cake, but left some of the egg shells in because baking is hard.

Deep Dive

Here’s a more in-depth review of the book, including my reasons for giving it a one-star rating.

Praise

It sucks, but if I’m honest, I don’t really have much praise for this one. I had to stop reading it. Maybe there was more later on in the book that I might have liked, but I wasn’t about to stick around and find out, unfortunately.

Criticism

Lets get into some of the reasons I DNF’ed this book.

Love at first sight.

The first thing that threw me off was Sig’s instant infatuation with Chloe. I think there are times that insta-love can work for me, but this just wasn’t one of them. Their initial meeting felt far too bland to warrant this kind of instant connection, and it felt unsustainable through the rest of the book. In fact, just before I decided to stop reading, I started to wonder if this might be an anti-romance book, something meant to teach you a lesson about going all-in on a person you barely know. Maybe it is—I did not finish the book, and so I’ll never know. (Except I have read other reviews, so I actually do know that’s not the case.)

Child-like heroine.

One of my biggest pet-peeves when it comes to our lead woman is when she’s infantilized, or acts like a child. The most recent example I can think of when it comes to this trope is Hot Frosty—a movie I recently tried to watch over the holiday season. I also didn’t make it through that one, partially because I just didn’t like the quality, and mostly because I hate when one half of the romance is coming from a being who’s essentially a child.

Chloe is a good example of this, though she’s not quite as fresh as a snowman come to life—she doesn’t know how to do anything herself, and is a frightened little bunny in the big city. It would have been interesting to see Chloe actually take control of her life when she leaves, but she essentially goes from being under her mother’s care, to being under Sig’s. This kind of power imbalance—Chloe not knowing how to cook, clean, or behave as an adult, and Sig paying for all her things—makes it really hard for me to fall for the romance.

Unrealistic situations.

There are just too many things in this book that don’t add up for me. I mentioned this in passing about their initial meeting, which I didn’t feel was impressive enough to warrant Sig’s sudden infatuation. This continues on to the entire situation around them being step-siblings and so not being able to pursue a romantic relationship.

Chloe climbs into Sig’s truck the *day* she meets him, moving out of her mother’s place and going back to Boston with him that night. It’s a huge leap of faith to put in another person (and especially a man) that you’ve just met. This is not something her mother brings up once, which just seems *so* unrealistic to me.

I think this is really contrasted with It Happened One Summer, in which our main character really does take her independence into her own hands, seeking help from the romantic interest rather than wholly relying on him.

All in all, Dream Girl Drama just was not for me. If you enjoy books about insta-love or love at first sight, you may find more enjoyment from this one than I did.

If you’re interested in any of the books I mentioned, please consider shopping for them through my affiliate links. (Every book cover is linked!)

Thanks for watching!

These area some books I may read next:

Deion Malloy