Seatmate by Cara Bastone, narrated by Amanda Ronconi, Zachary Webber, Josh Hurley, Carol Monda, Corey Allen, Allyson Johnson, Eric Yves Garcia, Dina Pearlman & Tanya Eby – C I enjoyed the first two audio novellas in the Love Lines series – Call Me Maybe  and Sweet Talk – so I was keen to listen to book 3, Seatmate. Unfortunately I didn’t find it as charming or engaging as the earlier two novellas which both were about the B+ range for me. Seatmate is a different story altogether. Rather than most of the relationship being on the phone as is the case with the earlier two books, this time, most of the plot takes place over about 5-ish hours during a journey between Boston and New York – first by bus and then by other means of transport. This time there is also a full cast rather than just the dual narration of the first two novellas. Seatmate was an almost real-time novella, whereas the other books take place over a greater period. For me, this meant that the boring bits were skipped in the first two books but not so much in the third one.

But my other problem was with the narration. It pains me to say this because I rate both Amanda Ronconi and Zachary Webber very highly. They’re amongst my favourite narrators. But I don’t think this format suited them. Seatmate is like a radio play, with sound effects and no “he said” “she said” and to my ear Ronconi and Webber (who voice the love interests Gwen and Sam) sounded forced and uncomfortable at times. It’s possible (maybe even likely) that the performers were giving me the exactly right performance and if that’s the case, well it was the dialogue itself which was the problem. I’m not sure, but either way there were parts of it that just didn’t work for me. I may well be an outlier here – certainly I know some of my Twitter friends have rated this listen very highly. But for me it was kind of boring in places and perhaps a little too realistic – I did feel like I was eavesdropping rather than listening to a story.

Gwen and Sam had 5 hours and 10 minutes to make me believe they were in love and I’m not sure they quite did it. I liked both of them and I could have believed their HEA more but I only had one afternoon’s acquaintance and all of it at that to do so. It’s a fascinating experiment; a real-time romance. But ultimately it didn’t quite convince me. I didn’t hate it but the others are much better IMO.

Seatmate is included in the Audible Plus catalogue.

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Reviews of these books will be up soon at AudioGals.