Category: B reviews (Page 4 of 74)

Legacy by Nora Roberts, narrated by January LaVoy

April 25, 2023 / Kaetrin

Legacy by Nora Roberts, narrated by January LaVoy. Great narration but fairly light on the romance. Watch out for some fatphobia too.

Legacy is Nora Roberts’ 2021 release which has been languishing on my TBR until now. While I think it is not close to her best work, it certainly held my interest. The romance side of things is very slow to start and not at all the main focus of the book.

Adrian Rizzo was 7 years old when her father tried to kill her. She had been raised by a single mother; her biological father was a college professor who couldn’t keep it in his pants, had a problem with alcohol and was violent when he didn’t get his way. Somehow a reporter found out about Adrian’s existence which led to the professor’s downfall and definitely makes him (and his wife!) unhappy. So, dear old dad pays Adrian’s mother a visit and does violence to all in the house. As much damage as he causes, he does not survive the experience.

Adrian’s mother started “Yoga Baby”, fitness and workout classes, videos and merchandise. By age 16, Adrian wants to start her own version of the business and over the next few years, becomes very successful. Around the time she first found success with “Next Generation” she started getting poems containing death threats – one a year at first.

Adrian ends up moving to a small town where her grandparents are and settling in. She’s not like her mother who enjoys constant travel. Adrian wants to put down roots. She prefers to have a streaming type service for her workouts but does videos with her mother regularly too.

There’s a lot of family stuff. Roberts writes engaging characters so it was entertaining enough, particularly with excellent narration from January LaVoy.

Adrian’s eventual love interest is Raylan Wells. But Raylan has a tragedy of his own to live through first. (I’d heard about this from a friend when the book first came out and it was a reason I delayed starting Legacy.)

The threats to Adrian are escalating and eventually Adrian’s mother puts a private investigator on the case. She has more time than the police or FBI and she starts to make headway. She also finds out that “the poet” has killed multiple women in the years since he or she first started sending verses to Adrian. The threat to Adrian is very real.

The fitness and wellness aspects of the book were the least interesting for me. A little too much information and I felt uncomfortable with some of the messaging around the topic which I felt was fatphobic.

There were multiple instances where a character I came to care about died and I cried when I got to those bits.

The romance between Adrian and Raylan doesn’t even get started until 2/3 into the book and it’s fairly thinly developed. I prefer Roberts’ standalones which have more developed romance.

There were some other parts of the book which were a bit light on – for instance, Adrian is described as having a lifelong friendship with a character by the name of Lorilee but there’s almost nothing more about it in the book.

However, January LaVoy is always a pleasure to listen to and she elevated the story with her performance. As the title suggests, the characters in Legacy are multigenerational – Ms. LaVoy had the opportunity to showcase her wide variety of voices – multiple children, teens, adults and the elderly – all genders and all different. Just fantastic.

Of course, her tone and emotion was also wonderful, as I’ve come to expect.

While Legacy wasn’t my favourite, the narration alone made it worthwhile.

Grade: B

Hard Job by Annabeth Albert, narrated by Kirt Graves

April 12, 2023 / Kaetrin

Hard Job by Annabeth Albert, narrated by Kirt Graves. Enjoyable but not my favourite.

Hard Job is the second book in Annabeth Albert’s A-List Security series. This time, Duncan Lubov finds his HEA with rock star Ezra Moon.

The first book in the series, Rocky Start, Duncan’s younger brother, Danny, ended up with Duncan’s good friend and contemporary, Cash. It was a best friend’s younger brother, with a bit of age gap story. This time it’s younger brother’s best friend (Ezra is Danny’s BFF) and age gap.

There were enough similarities to the storyline that some of the conflict felt forced to me. For instance, why would Danny react badly to finding out Duncan and Ezra are together? He didn’t like it much when Duncan reacted badly to him being with Cash – but then he did the same thing!

Duncan owns A-List Security and is trying to grow the business. He is the son of a famous and notorious movie producer/director who has had multiple marriages and scandals. Duncan wants nothing to do with dear old dad and actively tries to avoid trading on the Lubov name.

Ezra and Danny used to be a on a TV show called “Geek Chorus” – I imagine it to be something like Glee – and have remained friends. Ezra went on to become a successful rock star with his band We Wear Crowns but he’s in trouble with his record label after an incident where a fan was injured at a concert. Ezra is in need of new security and does not wish the record label to choose who that is. Danny persuades Duncan to do the job personally.

Duncan ends up joining the We Wear Crowns tour and is therefore in close proximity to Ezra. Each has secretly been attracted to the other for some time and Duncan is a closet Crowns fan. Duncan doesn’t believe in love and relationships, having seen the example of his father and is generally a reticent type of guy. Ezra grew up with loving and supportive parents and is extroverted and open.

After some initial differences, Duncan and Ezra give in to their attraction. Duncan does not want to get a reputation for sleeping with his clients and does not think there can be anything long term for them anyway, so they keep it a secret.

Over the course of the remainder of the tour though, their feelings deepen and grow. But Duncan is stuck on what people will think if he’s in a relationship with Ezra. Ezra is hurt that Duncan puts his business and rep over their happiness.

I admit I was a little lacking in sympathy for Duncan here. I didn’t quite see how it was a big deal for him to be in a relationship with Ezra. In fact, I thought it was better that it was an actual relationship rather than just having a fling.

Duncan and Ezra were both likeable enough but there wasn’t anything in the story which truly grabbed me. It was enjoyable enough but it didn’t wow me.

Kirt Graves’ narration was good but there were a few vocal errors and a couple of instances of unusual (to me at least) pronunciation. Also, and maybe this is just me, but it sounded like Mr. Graves spoke with this jaw clenched sometimes and that was not my favourite. I found it easy to tell when Ezra or Duncan was speaking – the character voices were well differentiated – and the emotion and pacing was fine too. Like the story, the narration was enjoyable but not a standout.

Grade: B-

Project Hero by Briar Prescott, narrated by Kirt Graves and Joel Leslie

January 4, 2023 / Kaetrin

Project Hero by Briar Prescott, narrated by Kirt Graves and Joel Leslie. Enjoyable story but it made me feel a little old!

Project Hero is my first Briar Prescott book. I’m starting to wonder if I may have aged out of college-set romance because this book felt a little young to me. Perhaps that was more down to one of the characters himself though – I lack additional data points.

Andy Carter is apparently a neurodivergent college student studying graduate physics. He believes himself to be in love with his best friend, Falcon, ( now that’s a name!) but is firmly in the friendzone. Andy is shy and has very little sexual experience. Andy has few friends and suffers from extreme social anxiety. The idea of “performing” in front of a crowd (this may be anything more than talking to 2 people at once, so “crowd” is doing a bit of work here) terrifies him.

Lawrence “Law” Anderson is also a student at the same college but his passion is hockey. He is the assistant coach for the college hockey team after a medical diagnosis meant he could no longer play. Law wants to coach hockey professionally – something which has put him at odds with his high-achieving and very business-oriented parents.

A number of rookies on the team are flunking physics and are in desperate need of tutoring in order to maintain the necessary GPA so they can continue to play. Law identifies that the best option to keep his guys playing is to convince Andy to tutor them. Andy’s social anxiety is such that this seems unlikely however.

Still, Law is persistent and comes up with a potential solution. In the meantime, Law has cottoned on to Andy’s infatuation with Falcon (a basketball player and “enemy” of Law’s for reasons).

Andy and Falcon and a couple of other guys on the basketball team share an apartment. Andy is staying at the college for the summer as he’s doing some work for his physics professor and Falcon is going home to work in the family business. Andy decides he needs to stop being the “sidekick” and become the “hero” while Falcon is away. Law volunteers to assist Andy with his project in return for Andy tutoring the rookies in physics. In that way, there is something that put me in mind of the set up Elle Kennedy’s The Deal. Project Hero is a very different book however, not least because it is MLM.

Over the course of the summer, Andy finds himself growing closer to Law and vice versa. When Andy learns that Falcon won’t become involved with a virgin and, realising that he’s come to trust Law, he asks Law for “sex lessons”. Law is already in deep with Andy at that point even though he thinks it’s useless given Andy’s feelings for Falcon.

But does Andy really love Falcon romantically or is it something else? Is what is developing between Law and Andy the relationship he’s been looking for after all? (It’s a romance so I probably don’t need to say where this is going.)

Andy often felt very young to me. I don’ believe it was his neurodivergence per se which gave me that impression; I’ve read plenty of autistic characters before and haven’t had that reaction. Perhaps it was something about his sense of humour. Which I liked – it was amusing – but which also tended to the hyperbolic and exaggerated.

Law, on the surface, was the more mature of the pair. He was more experienced in almost every metric but there were times when even he felt a little immature too.

Maybe it was just the set up. Maybe the entire concept of “Project Hero” was a little too young for me. This is where I wonder if it’s just me and I’m too old for college-set books now. I don’t know!

There were however plenty of things to like nonetheless. While I found my attention wandering from time to time, for the most part, I enjoyed the story. (Even though I rolled my eyes here and there.) The narration was very good and that certainly helped my listening experience.

Of the two performer I generally preferred Kirt Graves’ narration to that of Joel Leslie but that was more personal taste than anything skill related. I’m used to hearing Joel Leslie speaking with a British accent in audiobooks – even though his natural accent is American – so hearing him voice a US character feels a little weird to me. That’s unfair I know but there you go.

I have only a little experience with Kirt Graves’ narrations but each time I listen I know I want more. In this book I particularly liked the way that Mr. Graves delivered Andy’s catastrophising humour.

I enjoyed watching Andy “blossom” under Law’s attentions in all the various ways and the epilogue which takes place 10 years later showed just how successful “Project Hero” actually was – albeit not quite the way Andy had originally planned.

Grade: B/B-

So This is Christmas by Jenny Holiday, narrated by Cynthia Farrell

November 15, 2022 / Kaetrin

So This is Christmas by Jenny Holiday, narrated by Cynthia Farrell. I found the narration a little cold. (Pardon the pun)

So This Is Christmas is the third book in Jenny Holiday’s A Princess For Christmas series. This time, the starchy Mr. Benz, equerry to the King of Eldovia, gets his HEA. He’s played a pivotal cupid-like role in the earlier books, A Princess For Christmas and Duke, Actually but apart from that, until now, readers knew little about him. I’m here to tell you he’s a complete cinnamon roll. Not grumpy, but stiff and a little awkward on the outside and all marshmallow on the inside.

Cara Delaney is a change management executive from New York. She’s been supervising a subordinate, Brad, leading the project to modernise Mornot, the company wherein the Eldovian Crown holds a major stake and which is the main driver of the Eldovian economy. Mornot makes luxury watches but business hasn’t been good and the country’s economy is in danger. Brad broke his hip after falling from a roof and Cara had to take over the project at the last minute. She will spend the next month in Eldovia, flying home only on Christmas Eve. She will meet with the Mornot board, unions and employees and deliver her report of recommendations before she leaves. She’s sad to miss Thanksgiving with her parents, with whom she’s very close.

“Modernise” of course, usually means downsizing and layoffs so Matteo Benz is not happy to meet Cara. It’s not personal – he didn’t want to meet Brad either. When Matteo picks Cara up at the airport, he’s not only starchy, he’s outright prickly. He’s very open about not being happy to meet her.

Cara is pretty starchy herself, just in a different way. She’s very business oriented and doesn’t let a lot of feelings out. She avoids romantic entanglement.

Of course, romance listeners know that the sparks which fly when Matteo and Cara are in each other’s orbit means they’re destined to be together. I think I’d have been unconvinced in real life though.

Over the course of the month, Cara and Matteo are thrown together in various ways, going from a cold low-key hostile relationship to a truce, to a friendship to more. Even though they do get thrown together, there seemed to be a lot of time when they were doing things separately. I would have liked more of them together. They go from FWB to HEA at lightning speed. Their declarations of love felt hasty. There was an epilogue a year later which helped to embed the relationship but I felt like I missed the bit where they really fell in love. I did see their move to friendship and their blossoming attraction. It’s just that they jumped straight to the end from there and I had a kind of whiplash about it.

Possibly that was affected somewhat by the narration. Cynthia Farrell is a new-to-me narrator. She has a pleasing voice but it’s also a little on the strident side. The softer emotions were less impactful as a result. I didn’t warm as much to Cara as I think I may have in print.

Technically, Ms. Farrell performed well. There were no audible breath sounds or annoying tics. Her pacing was good.

There were however, multiple times where Cara’s voice and Matteo’s voice kind of blended and when one character began to talk it was not always clear to me who it was. Their voices were different but it felt like Ms. Farrell was a bit confused at times about which voice she was supposed to be using, so at the beginning of a piece of dialogue it would be equivocal and then settle into the right character. It was a little jarring.

Mostly though, I felt a certain lack of warmth in the story coming through the narration.

Having listened to all three books in the series now, my fondest wish is for all of them to have had the same narrator (preferably, the first one – Charlotte North). We now have three books where the character voices and their accents are all different. There is no narration consistency within the series – here, for example, Princess Marie had a thick German accent unlike in A Princess for Christmas and Imogen, the owner of the local pub did not have the Irish accent I expected to hear.

Ms. Farrell’s narration wasn’t bad. But I wonder if she might have been a bit mismatched to this project.

I enjoyed finding more out about the mysterious and stiff Mr. Benz and I’m glad he got his HEA. But So This Is Christmas didn’t have quite the warmth and charm of A Princess For Christmas had. That first book remains my favourite of the series and not inconsequently, it also has my favourite narration.

Grade: B

October Round Up

November 2, 2022 / Kaetrin

Monthly Mini Review

A Thief in the Night by KJ Charles – B+ At just under 3 hours of listening time, this little delight was easy to squeeze into my listening schedule. Those of us who’ve read or listened to The Gentle Art of Fortune Hunting may remember that siblings Marianne and Robin were missing a brother – Toby. He’d left home suddenly some years before after a falling out with their father and, while they understood why he’d left, they missed him and wondered what happened to him. We listeners need wonder no more as here he is.

Toby isn’t so much a thief as someone who steals things when “needs must”. He’s happy to work for a living but it’s not always easy to find work and there have been times where he’s stolen or sold himself to survive. While his preference would be not to do either of those things I got the sense that he doesn’t let what he has to do sometimes get him down too much. As the novella begins, Toby meets a handsome aristocratic man in a tavern. They have an enjoyable encounter in the dark and Toby has real regret when he later steals Miles’ watch and pocketbook – but, needs must.

Miles has just returned from the war and is on his way home. He had been estranged from his own father and had hoped they could reconcile but he’s found out he’s a week too late – his father suddenly passed away. When Miles, now the Earl of Arvon, does make it home, he finds a house in terrible disarray. The land has been sold off, there’s only one horse and the house is full of junk – his father was a hoarder of sorts. Continue reading

In His Protection by Sandra Owens, narrated by Patrick Zeller

September 28, 2022 / Kaetrin

In His Protection by Sandra Owens, narrated by Patrick Zeller. Enjoyable romantic suspense (mostly romance) and great narration but would have liked more of the dog!

I’ve enjoyed romantic suspense by Sandra Owens before and I love dogs so In His Protection caught my eye when it popped up at Audible. Unfortunately, there’s not quite enough of the dog – Fuzz – as I’d have liked. He does have a couple of pivotal scenes but the story is not very much about him.

Tristan Church is the chief of police in Marsville, North Carolina. The county sheriff is Skylar Morgan. (I admit I don’t understand why such a small area has two separate police forces but I’ve seen it in other books so I guess it’s a thing in the US, or at least some parts of it.) When Sky came to town to interview for the job, she met Tristan in a bar and they had a hot and steamy night together – first names only (her rule). Tristan was deeply smitten from the jump but when Sky returned to Marsville and realised who they were in relation to one another professionally, she pretended they’d never met and gave him the cold shoulder. Tristan has been trying to get her attention for a year.

Sky left Florida where she held a Chief Deputy position after a bad break up with a fellow cop. That man bad-mouthed her to her colleagues and started rumours she was dirty. She faced an investigation (she was cleared of any wrongdoing – she was actually innocent) and her reputation was severely damaged. She wanted a clean start but vowed not to date another cop. And what is Tristan? Argh.

However, the attraction between them won’t go away and when they are teamed up to plan the reopening of the Marsville UFO Museum (yes, that’s why it’s called Marsville), they’re forced into one another’s company even more and Sky’s fragile shield against his charm fails.

At around the same time, her ex turns up in town and someone burns down her apartment. Plus, there’s a deputy in the county sheriff’s department who has it in for her as well and after she fires him he makes threats against her. So there is a plethora of potential suspects available. It’s soon clear that someone is after something from Sky and won’t stop until they get it. This is where my biggest bone to pick with the story arises. Sky is an experienced and accomplished law enforcement officer. When Tristan asks her not to go anywhere alone it’s only because she’s a woman. There’s just no way he’d have made the same request had Sky been a dude. And, Sky went along with it rather than calling it out as the gendered BS it was! *frowny face*

The author does turn some things around though and Sky does get to do some heroics – just not without some Special Forces officers to help. Male of course. (Tristan’s brother Kade is a Ranger. He has another brother, Parker, who is the fire chief and a talented artist.)

The problem with the plot is that for Tristan to be protective of Sky and do any rescuing (and really, rescuing is one of my very favourite things in romance!) because she’s as talented and experienced as she is, it only serves to diminish her. Not entirely and not always a lot – but enough that I noticed and it grated a little.

The push/pull of the relationship is Sky’s reluctance to get in a relationship where, if it all went wrong, she’d have to leave town and start all over again AGAIN. This a real risk for her. Tristan does not think the town would turn on Sky if they broke up but he’s 100% all in anyway and wants her to be his forever. I do like a man in pursuit romantically (and respectfully) speaking. There again, sometimes Tristan made choices to withhold information from Sky that may have spooked her relationship-wise but which she had a right to know professionally so that was a minus in his column. It wasn’t egregious though and, lucky for him, it wasn’t anything that put her at risk.

That said, Tristan also overtly recognised that she needed to stand on her own with her deputies and not interfere with her work and he did treat her with due professional respect most of the time.

The narration was really good. It’s been ages since I’ve listened to Patrick Zeller and I had to ask myself why that was. He has a great range of character voices – from Parker’s 5-year-old daughter, Everly, to the old town matriarch, Ms. Mabel Mackle, to different tones for each Church brother and beyond. His pacing and tone are great and I really liked the emotion he brought to the performance as well. Not overdone; just right.

I’m sure I enjoyed In His Protection more on audio than I would have in print because of the narration. Some of the things which bothered me about the story were easier to manage with Mr. Zeller in my ears. In fact, I liked his performance so much, I immediately went and bought another Owens/Zeller audio collaboration.

Some of the suspense plot stretched my credulity to the breaking level but I enjoyed the romance and I liked Sky and Tristan (most of the time) and I liked them together.

Grade: B-