Wow, what a crock.

I DNF after about page 200 (deserve a like for this hard-fought victory) and tbh, if anyone did, I would question their taste level. In this rambling book, which I picked up at a hostel in Tel Aviv (amazingly, I finished the first one, which at least had action), we have the family continuing to fall out and behave like landed gentry pigs. Salt of the Earth pleb turned empressario Emma Harte is old and still calling the shots. Her illegitimate daughter is still grousing about absolutely nothing, NADA, and let me just say I was rooting for that piece of trash throughout the book. The nadir came when we have TWO separate people looking at the same portrait with lengthy descriptions. We get it, they´re educated. Not interested. Also, the room was purple with a cascade of flowers, the sky was periwinkle blue, the sun was beating like a heart, the Yorkshire Moors... ov vey, over it.

I have always disliked Emma hugely, a bland caricature of a ´working class girl done good´ - all the way through she is praised to the Heavens. This is both a discredit to the writing which TELLS us in classic chiclit fashion who is good and who is bad, but also with Emma who´s smug and unlikeable and with the characters who want to hang with this old goat. Yawn. The writing has a never-ending slew of turgid sayings, ´Love is a marriage of seeds, water the garden´ (excuse me, I have to vomit into my hat). There was also ridiculous showing, ´She was born in 1889, 11 years more than this century´ - hey BTB, we can work this out. We GET she is almost 80! The sex scene which used the word ´shaft´ (excuse me, there´s blood in my shoe, I have to leave) shows this chick can´t make a jot when it comes to a good love scene. Jackie Collins, Lord love her called a dick a dick. She made horny spinsters scream with joy. BTB couldn´t give a teenage boy an erection. Useless.

I´m slagging this book off and I´m having a marvelous time. If you´re still reading, I continued just to get to the bit where the matriach and blandest heroine in literature died. It was immensely satisifying, although I had to flick through the never-ending blandless of Paula, a carbon copy of Emma. And Miranda with her kooky costumes, that was lame too. It wasn´t groovy or whatever word they used ´a scream´ ´a multicoloured peacock´. Trash is an art, and this woman with her polysyllabic words (she gets the English language, that I give her, our lassie from Yorkshire) and unlimited wordflow is not trash, it´s barely feasible reality. Time to move on to some saga featuring young tarts who have no shame, class or culture and guys who don´t cry of unrequited love but who get into fist fights at the drop of the hat and who you want to be taken down a peg.

I would have given it another star except that the author chose to make Emma pass away, instead of having her live to be 100 as I really thought she would. The saga is just not the same without her, and for that reason I lost all interest in reading the next book. "To Be The Best": how could it be, without Emma?

But I did enjoy the Paula/Shane storyline, and liked a lot of the minor characters, such as Emily and Winston. I also got to learn a bit about business deals, what goes on in a coroner's court and something of horse racing, too, so you're not just reading a typical family saga. Ms. Bradford gives you drama, without going overboard with melodrama.

If she had just kept Emma around a bit longer.....

DNF. will later.

If you are more interested in what people look like, what they wear, what they eat, what they drink and what they drive than in character development and plot progression, then this is the book for you. I found the book tedious....much ad about little.

I loved this book l love all the series l have read
Hold the Dream was very enjoyable l am going to read to be the best l don't want to leave the story
BARBARA TAYLOR BRADFORD IS AN EXCELLENT WRITER

This story was like a script for a slow tv soap opera. There was 300 pages of story spread out in 750 pages. slow and boring

Interesting, the story set in the late 60s/early 70s could have been set in today times with just the switch of landlines and cell phones and replace telefax with emails or text messages

These were my first ‘adult’ book! I was probably 14?

Second book in the Emma Harte series. I do like these books and the stories are well told, just sometimes they seem a bit over the top with the descriptions of the characters and their many, wonderful traits. Other times her writing can be quite poignant and moving, but I do want to read them all and find out what happens which is a sign of a good series. One thing though, the editing, and it may just be as it was transferred to Kindle, is awful! Loads of mistakes, capital letters where there shouldn’t be, and sometimes wrong names of characters. Bit annoying to a pedant like me

I love Barbara Bradford and i like her style, Hold the dream conveys her style clearly, the characters are well formed and develop in the most logical and normal ways, it was a delight to read this book I loved Paula, Emma, Shane, Emily, and Winston not to forget Blackie too, however there were LOTS of unneeded conversations and descriptions specially business ones and they didn't add anything to the plot, the book is 835 pages, if you removed those unneeded pages the book will consist of 500 pages if not less, still the book was enjoyable, the writing style and characters drew me into the book, but isn't it always this way with Barbara Bradford ?

A little more dated than “A Woman of Substance”, but still held firm with the nostalgia of the series.

I adored A WOMAN OF SUBSTANCE (read it twice) but struggled through this book. Emma was such a complex character in WOS that I expected waaay more of this book. Whatever she accomplished in book 1was celebrated in this book ...idolised even.... but she never developed further.

Her handling of her offspring was spectacular when a certain event (that will not be spoiled) took place.... but beyond that... her children and grandchildren lacked depth of personality. They were either good and like her following in her footsteps or bad and trying to cheat her or do something bad. No one charted their own course and became a doctor or pilot. It got boring as heck after a while.

I do adored WOS I expected to gobble up the sequels but after reading this, I could not read another.

Het eerste deel van deze serie las ik, ondanks de dikte van het boek, met veel plezier in een keer uit. Daarmee had ik in deel twee veel meer moeite. Wat saai: die eindeloze opsomming van het uiterlijk en de kleding van mensen, van hun huizen, hun meubilair. En als er dan een stoel verschoven werd, kwam alles weer opnieuw langs. Daarbij leken alle namen op elkaar, en die waren ook niet uit elkaar te houden.
Jammer en teleurstellend.