Category: audiobooks (Page 2 of 93)

Better Hate Than Never by Chloe Liese, narrated by Charlotte North & Stephen Dexter

February 29, 2024 / Kaetrin

Better Hate Than Never by Chloe Liese, narrated by Charlotte North & Stephen Dexter. Enjoyable, modern retelling of The Taming of the Shrew.

Better Hate Than Never is the second book in the Wilmot Sisters trilogy and is a modern day retelling of The Taming of the Shrew.

Naturally, given its inspiration, our main character is Katarina (aka Kate) Wilmot, the sister who returned from Ireland at the end of Two Wrongs Make a Right, allowing the other Wilmot sister, Juliet, to take over her Irish cottage rental after Jules’ relationship went bad.

(Aside: I assume the next book be based on Romeo & Juliet – except with adults and a HEA? That will be interesting.)

Christopher Petrucio grew up next door to the Wilmot family. His parents and Kate’s parents were best friends. When Christopher’s parents were killed in an accident when he was a young teenager, the Wilmot’s became his second family and he was raised by his grandmother who moved in to his family home. He left for college but got so lonely for family he ended up moving back into his old house six years later, by which time his grandmother had passed away.

Christopher has known Kate all her life. He used to babysit her – even changed nappies (aka diapers) for her when she was really little. But after he returned home, Kate was all grown up and he looked at her differently. Because Christopher feared losing more loved ones he wouldn’t let himself fall for Kate and so their vibe became antagonistic rather than romantic.

Kate, for her part, has never felt like she fit into the family. She’s the youngest, Beatrice and Juliet, twins, being a little older than she. She has ADHD and knows that her brain is a bit chaotic. Her family love her and she loves them but she’s tended to love them from a distance.

Kate is a photographer with a passion for social justice. She’s been to a lot of dangerous places in the world in pursuit of her vocation and isn’t home often. This drives Christopher crazy. He hates that Kate puts herself in danger and is resentful that Kate doesn’t stay. Partly this is also because Christopher has his own issues and is afraid to leave.

When Kate comes back home to give Juliet a place to stay in Ireland, she finds herself being drawn in to a friend group and belonging in a way she’s never felt before. Except, Christopher is still his mean, grumpy self and they clash at every opportunity.

After a particularly mean argument at Thanksgiving, Kate’s dad asks Christopher to make an effort to make peace with her; it’s uncomfortable for the family for them to be fighting and Christopher had been out of line. Also, asking Kate to make peace would be like a red rag to a bull so her dad thinks this is the best approach.

Christopher’s immediate strategy is to stay away. Kate never hangs around long. But this time she does and he just can’t stay away any longer. Still, it’s not until a moment of vulnerability from Kate where she confesses that she believes he hates her, that Christopher decides to actively make things right.

Kate is suspicious at first. Why is Christopher being nice to her all of a sudden? If she believes him will he turn on a dime and hurt her even worse than before? Kate’s animus toward Christopher has largely been in self-defence – if she let down her guard, can he be trusted with her soft underbelly?

Once Kate and Christopher start spending time together not fighting, they find themselves giving into their latent attraction – although their intimacy develops slowly because Kate is demisexual and lacking in experience. She needs a high level of trust before she’s ready for much naked time. When they finally do the deed the scene is long – well over 30 minutes of listening time. Very detailed!

The conflict in the book is largely at the front; once each puts their guard down there is little keeping them apart. They’re really made for each other, in all the ways.

Charlotte North narrates Kate’s perspective and Stephen Dexter reads Christopher’s. I’m more familiar with Ms North (she’s a big draw for me) but both performances were very good. Christopher could have come across are more unkind than he was but Mr Dexter softened him a little. (Nothing Christopher said to Kate was unforgivable but there were times where an apology was more than needed.) I tend to dislike when characters are mean to one another so I think the nuance both voice actors brought to the book helped me here. Of course, the listener is aware of what’s going on under the surface from the text and that’s important too.

Both performers have great character differentiation and solid comedic timing, as well as the ability to deliver the emotion of some of the sadder aspects of the story (for example, when Christopher was thinking about the death of his parents).

The story is actually funnier than I’ve made it sound. Even when Kate and Christopher are loved up, their banter is snappy. Their dynamic is vibrant – when the pair work together instead of against each other, they are a formidable force.

I liked how there were no magical fixes to issues they had; both Kate and Christopher had to work with what they had and take leaps of faith from time to time (and in Christopher’s case, start therapy).

Better Hate Than Never was engaging and enjoyable – and made better by great narrators bringing their talent to a good story.

Grade: B

Fair Catch by Heidi McLaughlin, narrated by Stephanie Rose & Nelson Hobbs

February 22, 2024 / Kaetrin

Fair Catch by Heidi McLaughlin, narrated by Stephanie Rose & Nelson Hobbs. Spoiler Alert: I DNF’d it.

Fair Catch was my first book by Heidi McLaughlin and I fear it is very likely to be my last. I did not enjoy it. There are plenty of people who disagree with me: the book has a 4.37 rating on Goodreads. It was just not for me. Maybe I’m too old. Maybe I just like football too much.

Kelsey Sloane is a book editor in Portland. She receives a submission for a contemporary sports romance set in the world of NFL. Not knowing anything about football herself, she wants to make sure the author has her world building correct. So, she asks an assistant at the publisher to connect her with the city’s NFL team, the Portland Pioneers, so she can verify the sports stuff in the submission for herself. That was in the blurb. I really should have known better. Still, I have gone with stranger set-ups in the past and “romance reasons” covers a lot of ground.

(Aside: if Kelsey receives a submission featuring a surgeon does she have to observe a surgery to make sure the author knows what’s she’s talking about? Kelsey – Google/YouTube/Wikipedia is your friend.)

Anyway, because (and this, I could – mostly -believe) the assistant’s roommate works with the team, Kelsey is invited to a practice where, rather improbably, the coach assigns the centre, Alex Moore, to teach Kelsey all about football, instead of, you know, the assistant’s roommate who works with the team).

Alex is immediately deeply smitten (understatement) and wants to pursue a relationship. Kelsey is extremely naïve and my impression was that she didn’t really understand the level of Alex’s interest in her, nor his celebrity. She was very diligent and apparently skilled at her job but she seemed otherwise fairly clueless. (Perhaps that impression would have changed had I listened to more of the book.) For example: she asks Alex how to watch football (on her TV) as she doesn’t know how. Which… really? (Yes, I know some games are on cable but still.)

Alex invites her to a game. He messages her that he’s left a ticket for her. She doesn’t go because she thinks the game is next weekend instead of the weekend he tells her he’s left a ticket for her because that makes sense.

When she doesn’t show at the game, Alex’s teammates suggest he has to go bigger to really get her to understand how much he’s into her. They say he should get her sideline passes. SIDELINE PASSES.

I’m an Australian. Yes, I support the 49ers (go Niners!) and watch NFL so I know something about American football but even so it does not take much research (oh the irony) to know that sideline passes to games are not given out willy nilly. The NFL closely controls who is allowed on the sidelines. A book editor and would-be girlfriend of the team’s center is not ever going to be given a sideline pass. I seriously doubt it’s even possible for a center to obtain a sideline pass to an NFL game. There’s a reason Taylor Swift is in a box at the Chiefs games (except if they win the AFC Championship; then she’s on the field with Travis’s family on the field to watch the trophy presentation and to celebrate).

Then, at about chapter 6 or so, it is casually thrown into the story that the Portland Pioneers won the Super Bowl the year before. And I just couldn’t. Can you imagine the Chiefs allowing some random book editor onto their practice field and Andy Reid assigning an actual player to teach said editor about football? It’s beyond belief. My eyes were sore from the all the rolling.

World building means something to me and I could not believe the world this book was set in. It seemed to me like everything was just a flimsy excuse for two people to get together and have what I’m sure would be a lot of hot sex. And yes, to one degree, that’s what happens in romance – if you squint.

I love romance and I love a good hot sex scene. I even love a guy who is gone over his lady. But I do need a story around it that makes sense to me and Fair Catch did not. At least not up until that point and after then I was out.

Both Stephanie Rose and Nelson Hobbs are skilled and talented narrators. I’ve listened to both before. However, they were not enough to save the book for me. I didn’t listen to enough of the book to make much more comment on the narration other than that it was good in terms of character differentiation, pacing and tone, as I’d expect from this pair.

Probably if someone doesn’t know anything about NFL and/or doesn’t care, then Fair Catch would work better for them than it did for me. For me however: DNF.

Random in Death by JD Robb, narrated by Susan Eriksen

February 7, 2024 / Kaetrin

Random in Death by JD Robb, narrated by Susan Eriksen. Solid entry into a series which is very like catching up with old friends – but with added murder.

Reviewed for AudioGals.

Narrated by Susan Ericksen

Random in Death is book 58 in the In Death series. 58. That’s a pretty amazing feat all in itself. I took a break from the series for a little while (at about book 53 I think) but then came back to it last year and binged the books I’d missed. Now I’m right back into it.

I suppose it’s theoretically possible to start with this book – it does cover a discrete police investigation – but I suspect most of the nuance would be lost. That said, I think one could skip quite a few of the middle books if one was inclined and be just fine with this one.

Eve and Roarke remain happily married and banging regularly; McNab and Peabody are still happy and together; Mavis and Leonardo (with Bella) join the story, as do Charles and Louise and Dr Charlotte Mira – along with more important roles for Nadine Furst and her lover, Jake Kinkade, lead singer from Avenue A – and the rest of the Murder Squad at Cop Central. Knowing who all these people are and watching how they’ve grown throughout the series is half the fun of it.

At an all-ages Avenue A gig, a 16-year-old girl is murdered. Given she dies in Jake Kinkade’s arms, Eve is called in straight away. It quickly becomes clear that the murderer is an incel type and he won’t stop at just one so it’s a race against the clock before more victims end up on Morris’s slab at the morgue.

I’ve always enjoyed how J.D. Robb can make me care about characters quickly and Random in Death is no different in that regard. The family of the murder victim and their devastation got to me straight away.

The In Death series has a romance in it but it is not a romance series as such, not anymore. Now it’s a police procedural set in the near future (with many cool things) with more than a small helping of “slice of life” scenes from Eve and Roarke and their increasingly broad found family. I’ve grown away from police main characters in romance to a large degree but I think that the In Death series is set in the future (albeit only 40 years or so into the future) helps me here; they’re even farther removed from real life.

There’s not a lot more I can say about Susan Eriksen’s narration. She is the voice of the In Death series for me. Even were I to read a book in the series, I would hear her voicing all the characters. It’s a bit of a double-edged sword; she’s so closely associated with In Death for me that I can’t listen to her narrating anything else without thinking of Eve and Roarke and everyone else. On the other hand, she’s just fantastic with this series. She has a large cast of characters of all ages to play with, plenty of accents and the opportunity to grow many of those characters as are they are recurring in the series. She manages to keep all the accents straight as well. Charles and Louise may not appear in all that many books, but when they’re there, their voices are the same from book to book.

Random In Death has an evil criminal, sympathetic victims, an engrossing (if sometimes extremely lucky and possibly quite improbable) investigation and fantastic characters. While it’s not the best entry into the series, it is very solid and is far from my least favourite. Audio is generally my preferred medium for In Death books because Susan Eriksen is so good and this one did not disappoint.

Grade: B

It’s a Date (Again) by Jeneva Rose, narrated by January LaVoy

December 19, 2023 / Kaetrin

It’s a Date (Again) by Jeneva Rose, narrated by January LaVoy. Entertaining story, excellent narration.

It’s a Date (Again) begins after Peyton Sanders has left an encounter with an unnamed man who had confessed his love for her. She told him she did not love him back but as she’s walking down the street, she’s devastated and crying. She meets an unhoused man, who offers her some advice and as a result, she realises that the only reason she’s so upset is that she does in fact love this man – she’s just terrified of things going wrong. Fresh with the realisation that she made a mistake and desperate to correct it, she’s running back toward her man when she’s hit by a car. She wakes up four days later in the hospital, with almost no memories. One of her BFFs, Mya, with whom she was on the phone at the time of the accident, knows she was in love with someone but Peyton had not yet shared his name.

When three men turn up to the hospital shortly after Peyton wakes, each claiming to be her boyfriend, Mya proposes that Peyton date each again to determine which one is her true love. (Peyton had been non-exclusively dating, each man knew this so there’s no cheating.) Is it Tyler, the construction worker, Sean, the business consultant, or Nash, the chef?

Peyton’s other BFF, Robbie, thinks she should wait until she’s better before putting this pressure on herself but he comes around to the notion after Peyton becomes aware of their “marriage pact” made when they were both 19 and in college. If neither were in a serious relationship by the time she turned 32 (which is in just two weeks), they would get together.

Experienced romance readers know exactly where this one is going of course.

A couple of few things:

Is the US health system so bad that someone waking up from the coma is discharged the same day with only a check of vital signs?
Peyton doesn’t have any broken bones and apart from some scratches on her hands and her memory loss, has no other injuries to speak of. There’s not much by way of even a headache. After she gets out of hospital there’s mention of the scratches on her hands and taking some medication but otherwise, she’s A-ok. I guess she was just lucky??
Why a marriage pact which matures on Peyton’s 32nd birthday? That seemed pretty random. (It was never explained in the book.)
The story takes place almost entirely over two weeks. I kept tripping over the fact that Peyton was in a coma only days before (in one instance the day before) and she was already going out and dating. It seemed too unbelievable.

I know “romance reasons” exist but these things did make me roll my eyes a bit.

Still, if one can overlook those pesky details, the story was otherwise fun. It’s the sort of book one can easily envisage as a movie actually. The episodic nature of it suits cinema. It has the heat level of a mainstream PG13 movie too. (That’s fine – it didn’t need more and I didn’t feel anything was lacking.)

One of the three guys turned out to be a real jerk (of course) but there was a bit of a mismatch with the way he was presented at first. It seemed like he’d suddenly had a personality transplant. I put it down to the author not wanting readers to feel sorry for him when he was not “the one”.

I knew who Peyton loved from the beginning but I nevertheless enjoyed the journey to her (second) realisation of it. I also enjoyed the friendship between Debbie (Peyton’s landlord and kind-of fairy godmother), Mya and Robbie. Mya is a stand-up comedian and there were more than a few laughs in the story as a result.

Listeners may wish to know that the story references prior death of both of Peyton’s parents in a car accident.

The narration was one of the main draws for me as I’d not read this author before. But January LaVoy is a fantastic narrator and I knew she would keep my ears entertained if nothing else. She has a great range of character voices and excellent acting skills which shine through in her performance. There’s a reason she’s one of my favourite narrators. I especially like her male character voices – though I sometimes wonder how she gets them so deep and/or rough/husky without hurting her voice.

With so many potential “heroes” Ms LaVoy had an opportunity to display multiple lead voices to (maybe) keep listeners guessing. Any one of them would have worked.

It’s A Date (Again) was entertaining and enjoyable, so long as you don’t think too much about some of the plot details – and paired with narration the calibre of January LaVoy’s, I count it a win.

Grade: B

The Dance Deception by Becky Ward, narrated by Alix Dunmore

December 13, 2023 / Kaetrin

The Dance Deception by Becky Ward, narrated by Alix Dunmore. Great narration, big plot problems.

I enjoy dance competitions such as Dancing With the Stars/Strictly Come Dancing and I like a fake relationship so I expected The Dance Deception to be right up my alley. The sample of the narration, by Alix Dunmore, also seemed very promising. It turned out the narration – which did indeed live up to its promise – was the best thing about the book.

Kate Wareing has been successful in securing a place in a new TV dance show “Fire on the Dance Floor” – a version of Strictly with Latin dances only and featuring “normal” people instead of stars/celebrities. As it is the first season, the competition will only last five weeks. It is winner-take-all, with the top contestant walking away with £25,000. Kate, recently out of work due to a messy break-up, could really use the money.

Kate is paired with Merle, a Frenchman who is all about winning. He’s also gorgeous. I call Merle “the arse”. He is, obviously, from the very beginning, a complete arse. Kate, however, is bowled over by Merle’s good looks. The accent probably helps too. Within a couple of days, Kate and Merle have moved from making out to full-on sex – including an interlude where Merle films Kate (without her consent or knowledge) dancing naked (long story). (Merle quickly identifies that Kate is a much better dancer after an orgasm – she’s more relaxed and less “in her head”). Kate is at first shocked and dismayed by the video but Merle assures her he never uses the cloud and he promises to delete it. (Did I mention Merle is an arse? I think we all know where this is going.)

Before their first performance, Kate is very nervous so Merle takes her to his dressing room (he’s the only professional dancer with a dressing room because of course: arse) to give her a good rogering to settle her down. By the time Kate is at the pub with her friends and after the taping, there are photos online of their interlude. Kate is humiliated, of course. But worse, it is revealed that Merle is married. This does explain why Merle never went anywhere with Kate after practice and all of their interludes (apart from the dressing room one) were in the dance studio. He was such a creep and I was super disappointed in Kate for ever falling for his BS to be honest.

The scandal is great for the show because publicity but terrible for Kate. The next day, Kate is paired with another pro-dancer, Aleksis, and Merle has taken Aleksis’s erstwhile partner (who happens to be the best dancer of all of the contestants), Amelia. Merle apparently told the producers that he could not stay on the show if he remained partnered with Kate. Aleksis, for some reason, seems to detest Kate so the new pairing does not start off well.

There’s a reason for Aleksis’s animosity: Merle’s wife is his sister, Sophia.

It’s a fairly brave romance novel which starts off with the heroine having consensual sex with someone other than the hero. The Dance Deception is perhaps braver than most because in week two of the competition, Kate decides to try and get over Merle by having sex with Warren (a friend of her flatmate’s new boyfriend). It’s very bad (and fairly amusing, albeit entirely at Warren’s expense) and after that, Warren is basically never heard from again.

By the end of that second week, Sophia has explained to Aleksis that Merle is a serial cheater and she has finally decided to kick him out. Her decision; Kate is not a homewrecker. If anything, Sophia is grateful to her. (Which, okay, unusual but I can go with that.)

After week two’s taping when it’s clear that Merle and Amelia are now a couple, Sophia suggests to Aleksis and Kate that they fake a romance to increase their popularity (it’s an audience vote as to who goes through to the next round). So they do.

Nobody seems to question that the show has been going for barely more than two weeks and Kate has now been in TWO “relationships” with her professional dance partners. (And they don’t even know about Warren.) I’m all for sex positivity but this is a romance. Even when she starts thinking Aleksis is a nice guy and better looking than she first appreciated, she’s still hung up on Merle.

By the end of week three, Aleksis and Kate move in together to give the tabloids more fodder and to boost their chances of a higher audience vote.

By week four, Aleksis and Kate are in a real relationship.

The entire book takes place over the five weeks of the competition.

I did not feel confident that Aleksis and Kate really knew each other. I wasn’t confident in their relationship because I didn’t feel like I knew Aleksis all that well myself. I was left with the feeling that the only reason Kate was able to get over Merle wasn’t because he was a complete arse but because Aleksis started paying attention to her. I didn’t get the impression that Kate would do very well on her own. I thought she probably needed some time by herself to decide what she truly wanted in her life rather than bouncing from one man to another. Aleksis was certainly the best man in the bunch however, so she ended up with the best possible choice.

Given how OTT the story was to that point, I was extremely disappointed in the ending. Yes, there is a HFN/HEA but the arse didn’t get nearly enough of a comeuppance IMO. As expected, the video makes another appearance in the storyline and I will give the author credit for taking that into a somewhat unexpected place but she lost those points when the tension fizzled out completely.

On a much more positive note, the narration was very good. Alix Dunmore’s accent work was particularly impressive, with Merle’s French diction and Aleksis (and Sophia’s) Latvian (Russian-like) tones. Plus there were various British accents used as well.

Ms. Dunmore made Kate more sympathetic than I would have otherwise found her I think. I don’t blame the narration for my dislike of the “Fire on the Dance Floor” host, Kimberley. Kimberley sounded like exactly a cheesy TV show host with that annoying cadence, over-the-top enthusiasm and fake sincerity. Still, I’m glad there wasn’t more of her.

My only real criticism of the narration was that most of the character differentiation was based on accent and not pitch. There wasn’t any discernible difference between Aleksis and Sophia for example, which did lead to some occasional confusion. However, the rest of the performance was very good. If not for Alix Dunmore’s skill, I’m not sure I could have finished the audiobook.

The story itself was well-written (which is why the grade is as high as it is) – my issues were all with the plot which was just too much for me.

Grade: C

The Wake-Up Call by Beth O’Leary, narrated by Jessie Cave & Lino Facioli

December 7, 2023 / Kaetrin

The Wake-Up Call by Beth O’Leary, narrated by Jessie Cave & Lino Facioli. The story was better than the narration.

Reviewed for AudioGals.

Narrated by Jessie Cave & Lino Facioli

I’ve been a fan of Beth O’Leary since The Flatshare (has anyone seen the TV series? It’s pretty good – not as good as the audiobook of course, but still, pretty good!) and have been looking forward to The Wake-Up Call since it popped up in my Audible search some months ago.

Izzy Jenkins and Lucas Da Silva both work at Forest Manor Hotel & Spa in the New Forest. In December 2021, Izzy sends Lucas a Christmas card confessing her infatuation with him. Lucas sends her a generic Christmas card in return. To make matters worse, when Izzy goes to the mistletoe where she hopes to meet Lucas, she see him kissing her flatmate.

Thereafter, Izzy is Team Not-Lucas. She will do anything she can to make his life difficult at work; something that’s pretty easy because she’s a little chaotic and is a firm believer that more is more and everything is better with sparkle and he’s all about order, data and minimalism. (One of Izzy’s many tortures of Lucas is to make him say “Booking Book”.)

It’s clear from the beginning that Lucas is a little lost as to why Izzy went from being nice to him in 2021 to being a witch in 2022. I had a suspicion that maybe his Christmas card from Izzy went astray but Izzy checked with “Poor Mandy” who delivered the Christmas cards and she definitely delivered all of Izzy’s cards, along with everyone else’s to the staff and guests at Forest Manor. (Poor Mandy is so-named because she is the third person on the reception desk and stuck between Izzy and Lucas’s animus. It doesn’t help she has a self-esteem problem and won’t stick up for herself.) Poor Mandy has been the Christmas Elf at Forest Manor for ages and Lucas definitely got a card from Izzy. So… what happened?

The main portion of the story takes place in December 2022 when the ceiling of Forest Manor has caved in and between that, the pandemic and some poor business decisions by the (beloved) owners, the Bartholomews, it’s looking very likely the hotel will shut in the new year. At the very least, some staff will need to be let go. Izzy and Lucas have even more reason for their rivalry now of course.

Over the next couple of weeks Izzy work both with each other and against each other and their latent attraction roars back to life. But Izzy can’t trust Lucas because he humiliated and betrayed her last Christmas. But… maybe a fling would work?

For Lucas’s part, he wants a lot more with Izzy but she doesn’t seem to want him back so he’s reluctant to fling with her because his heart is involved.

I think we all know where this is going.

But that’s pretty common with romance isn’t it? We know it’s going to end at the HEA – it’s all about the journey.

Beth O’Leary has a wonderful humour to her writing which works really well for me. This story is a little more than a big misunderstanding, although a frank conversation early on would have changed everything. As much as I enjoyed the story, I also admit misunderstandings aren’t my favourite.

I found the narration less engaging. Jessie Cave performed all of Izzy’s sections. She was a perfect Izzy and nailed the humour but she did not have any character voices really so there was basically no differentiation between Izzy and everyone else. Still, I enjoyed Ms Cave’s performance better than Lino Facioli’s.

Mr Facioli narrates all of Lucas’s POV and while he does have some character differentiation (a plus) I found his pacing and syntax a little off. I looked Lino Facioli up on the Google and he is in fact a Brazilian-English narrator so he should have been perfect for the role. Lucas is a Brazilian living in England after all. When Mr Facioli was delivering an English accent (as most of the rest of the cast required) he was fine but when he was speaking as Lucas – either by way of narrative or dialogue, he would put odd pauses in between words or phrases, where they didn’t naturally fit. There didn’t seem to be any particular reason for it – unless he ran out of breath maybe? (There was also some audible breathing which… no.)

The Wake-Up Call is full of wonderful quirky characters (other staff and guests of the hotel mainly) and Lucas and Izzy are genuinely delightful and completely belong together. The narration was not quite what the text deserved. However, the story kept me so engaged I was able to overlook most of my concerns and just go along for the ride.

Grade: B