I’m over at Dear Author with a review of Dragged to the Wedding by Andrew Grey. Disappointing.
Tag: contemporary (Page 11 of 122)
Fly Bye by CW Farnsworth, narrated by Courtney Patterson & Neill Thorne. The narration was stronger than the story.
(received review copy from Podium Audio.)
Everly (Evie) Collins has just finished medical school in Boston. She’s returned home to Charleston to do her residency. She’s super smart so was able to graduate early. When she was five years old, Grayson Phillips and his parents moved into the house next door. Gray and Evie’s brother, Noah, became best friends. Evie never got over her crush. Fly Bye is their journey to a HEA.
Gray is a pilot in the Air Force and even though he is not based in Charleston, nonetheless has an apartment he shares with another friend. I don’t know why. There are quite a few things Gray does or says which didn’t make sense to me or strike me as plausible. For instance, one of Gray’s favourite things is “surfing a flat sea” (I believe that’s called “paddling”). I don’t think a fighter pilot is allowed to bring his girlfriend onto base and take her up for a joy ride in a jet. I don’t think fighter pilots on deployment get come home for 24 hours as “co-pilot” for a fellow pilot who has a family emergency. (It wasn’t stated explicitly but it was strongly implied that they flew a fighter jet 5000 miles for this.) So, yeah, there were things which were all for plot and not because they made actual sense.
Anywho, Gray is in town and Evie and he decide to have a fling. She’s a virgin because of course she is. He balks at first but then changes his mind and they bang a lot for about a month but from the beginning, Gray makes it clear he’s not a long term option. However, Gray’s words and actions don’t always line up and Evie becomes, understandably, confused. After Gray is deployed he calls her and tells her she is on his list of people to contact if something happens to him. That’s not what you’d expect from a fling.
Evie graduated early but she’s not Doogie Howser. Much of the time she came across to me as emotionally immature and this didn’t really gel with the rest of her character and the mettle it takes to succeed in medical school.
There was a little too much of nothing happening – a whole bit about Evie having lunch at work one day for example where nothing happened except she didn’t enjoy the anchovies repeating on her afterwards and bought an iced tea afterwards – that made my eyes glaze over.
I struggled with this listen. I was tempted to DNF it at times. However, I did listen until the end and there were some entertaining and engaging things in the book. Gray and Evie did have good chemistry and the section when they were in Beaufort (I’m guessing at the spelling here but it was pronounced Byew-fort in the book if that helps) was my favourite. Gray could be a real jerk at times but he could also be sweet and he did give good grovel.
The narration, by Courtney Patterson (except for the epilogue which was read by Neill Thorne), was very good even though at times I thought the material she had to work with was not. Her character voices were well differentiated and she had good tone, pacing and emotion. I’d happily listen to her again.
Neill Thorne’s narration was so brief it was difficult to really have an opinion on it. Good, I guess? The grade here is for Ms. Patterson though as she did the bulk of the book.
Fly Bye didn’t turn out to be my cup of tea but it has a 4.17 rating on Goodreads to I seem to be in the minority.
Grade: C
I’m over at Dear Author with a review of A Holly Jolly Ever After by Sierra Simone & Julie Murphy. Not as successful for me as the first book sadly.
I’m over at Dear Author with a review of Wreck the Halls by Tessa Bailey. There seemed to be something missing. Not terrible but not my favourite Bailey.
I’m over at Dear Author with a review of Time to Shine by Rachel Reid. Charming, delightful and funny. Recommended.
The Honeymoon Crashers by Christina Lauren, narrated by Adriana Sananes, Cynthia Farrell, Deacon Lee, Harry Shum Jr., Inés del Castillo, Jennifer Aquino, Jessica Marie Garcia, Kimberly Woods, Lee Osorio, Shaun Taylor-Corbett, Stephanie Németh-Parker & Tim Paige. The full cast recording was not what I expected (not in a good way) but I loved Harry Shum Jr’s performance.
I read the The Unhoneymooners recently and queued The Honeymoon Crashers up very soon after. In The Unhoneymooners, Olive and Ethan, the maid of honour and best man, respectively for their siblings Ami and Dane, end up on the honeymoon in Maui instead as the rest of the wedding party and all the other guests get horrible food poisoning. (Spoilers for The Unhoneymooners follow by the way.) Unfortunately, Dane ended up being a cheating dirtbag so the marriage went into the toilet too.
The Honeymoon Crashers takes place four years after the events of the first book and now, Olive and Ethan are getting married. Worried about the “Torres wedding curse” they decide to elope to Maui. But that’s not really what the couple wants and it’s certainly not how the Torres family works. Ami, ever the organiser, springs into action to get the family to Hawaii and organise a wedding in less than two weeks. In Maui, she meets Brody Keeton who is a friend of Ethan’s and who will be Ethan’s best man (Dane not being welcome in the wedding party for obvious reasons). Olive and Ethan ask that Brody help plan the wedding as he knows loads of people on the island and will help smooth the way given the tight budget and short notice.
Ami is initially less-than-thrilled to share the organising but Brody wins her over pretty quickly with his laid-back attitude and his buoyant sense of fun. There’s more to Brody than that – something has had him hiding in Maui for the previous six months and licking his wounds. In Ami and the wedding planning, Brody finds a delightful distraction and feels more like himself than he has in months.
The audiobook is novella length – just under five hours – and there is not a lot of time to fully develop a relationship. This is especially the case because it’s clear Brody is dealing with some heavy things. Those things are really only canvassed right near the end. To be completely honest, at about 38 minutes to go I was seriously wondering if this audiobook was going to be a kind of prequel. It wasn’t – there’s a solid HFN – but things were wrapped up very quickly. Brody and Ami could have used a little more time.
I usually enjoy a full cast narration and I expected to here. But I ended up being really confused by it. Usually in an audiobook, there is one narrator who does all the character voices or, two narrators who swap by POV – whoever’s POV the story is in, that narrator does all the narrative and dialogue for everyone and then when the POV shifts to the other protagonist, the other narrator takes over. Usually, with a full cast recording, the POV character’s narrator is responsible for the narrative/text and their own dialogue but all other dialogue is performed by a specific narrator cast for that particular role. And that’s what happened here – sometimes. I cannot for the life of me work out why this was so, but there were other times in the listen where Harry Shum Jr narrated entire sections including all dialogue (ie Ami’s too) or when Jessica Maria Garcia read another section and did all the dialogue (Brody’s, Diego’s). Then it would swap back to the full cast and vice versa. It wasn’t even chapter by chapter! It was just… sometimes it would be one way and sometimes it would be another and it was super weird.
I very much enjoyed Harry Shum Jr’s performance. He nailed Brody’s laid-back nature and sense of humour and, even though I was confused it was even present in the audiobook, I liked his female character voices. Mr. Shum Jr should definitely narrate more romance audiobooks is what I’m saying.
I didn’t feel the same way about Jessica Maria Garcia. (I believe she narrated Ami – except when it was Harry Shum Jr doing it that is. There’s a short video clip on the author’s website where Harry Shum Jr and Ms Garcia introduce themselves so it stands to reason they voice the main characters. I can’t be 100% sure though so apologies if I’ve got that wrong. I couldn’t find anywhere an actual cast list (Graphic Audio does this really well publishers please note). Anyway, Ms. Garcia’s volume was all over the place; sometimes she was too yell-y and other times her volume was less than a whisper, making it impossible to hear. Still other times, her voice trailed off so words were lost. Sometimes she spoke too quickly (seriously, one time she said “raw seafood” and it sounded like “rossi food” and it took me a minute to clue in).
The other narrators were all fine; there wasn’t a great deal from any one of them so I can’t really say more than that they did a good job.
I would like someone to explain to me the decision making involved in the way the narration style chopped and changed throughout the listen – I don’t even know what to call it. I mean, if you have a full cast – why not use it??
Grade: B-
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