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December Round Up

Monthly Mini Review

side view of a pretty blonde young white woman in a red regency style dress standing near a green velvet couch and smilingWhen She Was Naughty by Tessa Dare – A Tessa Dare sent a Christmas gift to her newsletter subscribers so I got this one for free but it’s only 99c from etailers. It’s about 50 pages and it’s such fun. It’s a Christmas bon bon of delight, a frothy funny confection which had me laughing out loud. Chloe Garland believes the Earl of Deverell, Justin Montague, does not like her and disapproves of her frivolity and enjoyment of life. She thinks he’s a stuffed shirt but he’s around her family all the time since his only relative, a beloved cousin married into the Garland clan. She convinces him the annual Garland Christmas Eve ball is one where all the men of the family wear “ugly Christmas waistcoats” in a nod to ugly Christmas sweaters.

Only Chloe is wrong about how the earl feels toward her and a frank discussion in the moonlight inspires her to rethink their past acquaintance.

One Dance with a Duke by Tessa Dare, narrated by Leslie Bellair

Why I listened to it: I picked up book 2 and 3 in the trilogy on sale recently but they’d ran out of book 1, so when I saw this cheap at Audible I decided to take the plunge.
What it’s about: (from Goodreads)  True temptation begins at midnight…A handsome and reclusive horse breeder, Spencer Dumarque, the fourth Duke of Morland, is a member of the exclusive Stud Club, an organization so select it has only ten members — yet membership is attainable to anyone with luck. And Spencer has plenty of it, along with an obsession with a prize horse, a dark secret, and, now, a reputation as the dashing “Duke of Midnight.” Each evening he selects one lady for a breathtaking midnight waltz. But none of the women catch his interest, and nobody ever bests the duke — until Lady Amelia d’Orsay tries her luck.In a moment of desperation, the unconventional beauty claims the duke’s dance and unwittingly steals his heart. When Amelia demands that Spencer forgive her scapegrace brother’s debts, she never imagines that her game of wits and words will lead to breathless passion and a steamy proposal. Still, Spencer is a man of mystery, perhaps connected to the shocking murder of the Stud Club’s founder. Will Amelia lose her heart in this reckless wager or win everlasting love?

What worked for me (and what didn’t): At first, I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to get through this one.  The narrator is new to me and feels very inexperienced.  A search on Audible (even with my geo restrictions) shows however she has 22 audiobooks dating back to at least 2010.  As the book progressed however, Ms. Bellair did improve her expression, but there was never a true “hero” voice.  He spoke more sternly than the heroine and that was about it.  There was definition between the female characters but the male voices were fairly universal and I relied solely on dialogue tags and context because the voices were no clue.
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