I’m over at Dear Author with a review of System Collapse by Martha Wells. Loved it – but I do recommend recapping Network Effect before starting this one.
Category: reviews (Page 11 of 117)
Ice Breaker by Nichole Rose, narrated by Hannah Altagracia & Stephen Borne. A good start but then things went under pretty fast.
Reviewed for AudioGals. 2.5 stars (the narration was good).
Narrated by Hannah Altagracia & Stephen Borne
The blurb for Ice Breaker looked fun. I enjoy sports romance and I like to try new-to-me authors and narrators from time to time. Novella length audiobooks are a good entry point I think – they give a good taster but with less commitment.
Ice Breaker started well. The narration is solidly good without necessarily being stellar; Stephen Borne has a pleasant raspy huskiness to his voice and his female characters were well done. Hannah Altagracia had a believable enough hero voice without it being super deep and she delivered on Camila’s wide-eyed innocence.
Gray Larsen is a hockey player for the Nashville Predators and needs a new publicist. He punched his previous publicist in the face after he (the publicist) leaked footage of Gray and a woman with whom he was on a date which made the woman look bad. The Predators’ publicist (who for some reason doesn’t represent him and can’t?) suggests Camila Gomes.
Camila doesn’t date athletes. Her sister was cheated on (and worse) by an athlete and subsequently died when her car drove off a bridge. It may have been an accident or the result of her mental distress. Nobody can know. Camila’s beloved adoptive brother was also an athlete and he’s clearly not a jerk so I must say the “no athletes” rule didn’t make a lot of sense to me. As it happened, that rule didn’t last a week after meeting Gray.
Gray and Camila are introduced by the team’s publicist and Gray is immediately smitten. I don’t mind a bit of insta-lust and the notion that a guy could take one look at a woman and say “I’m going to marry that woman” is admittedly romantic to me, so I was prepared to go with it. Camila and Gray clearly have matching sparks flying between them and a lot of chemistry.
But things went off the rails from there.
In no particular order, here is a non-exhaustive list of things I yelled *out loud* at the audiobook as I listened:
“Oh come on now! You don’t even know each other!”
This was after Camila (heretofore a virgin) was in the midst of sex with Gray for the first time and tells him she loves him. They have known each other less than a week and have spent less than 6 hours in each other’s company. This consisted of the meeting in the publicist’s office, some text messages through the week and one date where they played video games and pool for a couple of hours before having sex.
“You’ve only seen her TWO times!”
This was in the response to Gray thinking “she looks more beautiful than I’ve ever seen her”. (My husband pointed out, unhelpfully, that his statement could nonetheless be true.)
“WHAT???!!!”
This was a response to Gray telling Camilla, the very first time they had sex, that he just knew she didn’t want him to use a condom because she wanted to have his babies and that he wanted her to stay in bed with him until she was pregnant. There are So. Many. Things wrong with that statement. Not okay Gray.
Sometimes Gray thinks of Camila as a strong, smart, independent woman deserving of respect and autonomy. Other times he thinks of her as…. not.
“Can romance please be done with this?”
Was in response to Camila’s “will it fit?” (While I’m at it, the hymen is on the OUTSIDE not way up in there.)
“Creepy and gross!”
This was after Gray saw his jizz leaking from Camila and thought he’d like her to wear it all the time so that everyone would know “she’s mine”. *shudders*
Apart from the brief epilogue, the story takes place within an eight day period which is lightning fast. Like insta-lust, I don’t mind a bit of insta-love, but I can’t say I felt like the pair knew each other really so I’m not sure I bought it. Camila moves in after the first date – the same date where she told him she loved him and he told her he wanted to get her pregnant as soon as possible. According to the epilogue which takes place 5 years later, she was pregnant within about 3 months. They are still happily together after five years, so there’s that.
What did save the experience for me was the narration. As I said above, I enjoyed the performances even though I was not super-in-love with the text. I especially liked Stephen Borne’s narration – the difference between his natural husky, deep voice and the female character voices was impressive and there was no hint of caricature. I’d happily listen to him again. I liked Hannah Altagracia’s narration too, but not quite as much. I would not necessarily seek out a book because she was reading it but equally, it would not be any barrier for me to see her name listed.
There is definitely an audience for stories like Ice Breaker. The novella has a rating of 4.16 on Goodreads. But that audience is not me.
Grade: D
Shanna by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss, narrated by Robin Miles. I did not love the narration but the story held up pretty well, considering.
Story holds up but narration was a little disappointing.
I have a confession. Shanna is on my keeper shelf. First published in 1977, it was one of those novels I cut my romance-reading teeth on, before I knew much of anything about anything. It’s, obviously, “old skool” romance. But, as these books go, it has much less of the more egregious or objectionable content than others and is, while still problematic, it is at least far less so than others from this author or of the time period.
Harper has released Woodiwiss’s novels on audio with new recordings. Each has a (long) foreword which talks about how the book is of it’s time etc etc. I didn’t listen to it. I know the book already so I knew what I was getting into.
Shanna is also a long book – the kind of sweeping story you don’t get much these days (there are reasons for that – some good, some not so much IMO) – my paperback is 656 pages and the audiobook, complete, with foreword, tops out at nearly 30 hours.
Shanna Trahern is the young, beautiful and wilful daughter of Squire Orlan Trahern (who is Welsh but you wouldn’t know that from the narration – more on that later). Squire Trahern owns a small island “Los Camellos” somewhere not terribly far from England. It takes about a week to sail there in an old-timey ship but it’s tropical. That’s what I know. He’s a wealthy and widowed merchant with a longing for grandchildren and so he’s very keen for Shanna to marry. Unfortunately for him, Shanna is picky and he eventually gives her an ultimatum: find someone she wants to marry within a year or he will do the picking for her. Shanna is not having it. She has found no-one suitable and so comes up with a scheme to flout her father’s will. There is a condemned prisoner in Newgate with the impressive surname of Beauchamp (pronounced “Beacham”; something I only know because of Outlander – English is stupid) but due to hang within the week. She offers a bargain to Ruark Deverell Beauchamp, a colonial from Virginia: in return for his name, she will make his final days easier. Ruark, makes his own amendment to the deal. He will marry Shanna, but he wants a true wedding night. She agrees.
The only dubious consent (between the love interests at least) in Shanna arises from this bargain. Shanna makes the deal but plans to renege. Her plan was for the reneging to occur before any hanky panky in the carriage after the wedding, but she mistimes her “rescue”. As it happens, Ruark takes her virginity but is unable to, er, finish, let’s say. Ruark doesn’t exactly force Shanna to consummate the marriage – he is far more persuasive than that and she is not immune to his charms. Still she doesn’t exactly give enthusiastic consent either. I viewed it as a kind of sex work – the book certainly references it as a bargain struck. YMMV.
After that, the sex is all fully consensual. And, for a mainstream book from 1977 there is a lot of it. It’s not explicit – there is an abundance of euphemism and the prose is a little purple but Shanna and Ruark are boning down pretty regularly throughout the story. There’s probably something a bit revolutionary about that deserving of its own op-ed but I don’t have time for it here so I’ll move on.
Shanna, believing Ruark duly hanged, returns to Los Camellos and her father a “widow”. Squire Trahern thus thwarted must respect her bereavement.
Only, Ruark, due to the machinations of a greedy gaoler and a corrupt man of business, has escaped the hangman’s noose and has instead been sold as a “bondslave” (a kind of indentured servitude) to none other than the squire himself.
It does not appear that Squire Trahern is a slave owner in the sense of the African slave trade. He does buy “bondslaves” by paying their debt following an auction and then, in return for their labour, paying them a wage and keeping some of it until the debt is repaid. The squire’s bondsmen are, from what I could tell, fairly well looked after, have autonomy in many ways and are not locked up (at least not once on Los Camellos) or restricted in a cell or anything like that. They can’t leave the island until their debt is paid but they have the run of the place. They are provided with clothing and a wage which I gathered was fair for the time (?) and they are given the ability to earn more if their work is good.
(Ruark is a very good worker and he quickly gets a number of pay rises. It doesn’t take long for Ruark to become the squire’s right-hand man when it comes to farming, and he is often found at the squire’s table for breakfast or dinner. The squire doesn’t have any qualms about sharing his dinner table with Ruark and demands Shanna treat him as a guest when he is there.)
There is talk in the book of “slaves” but they are, for the most part, indentured labour who are not permanently enslaved – here is how Wikipedia differentiates the two: indentured servitude of Irish and other European peoples occurred in seventeenth-century Barbados, and was fundamentally different from enslavement: an enslaved African’s body was owned, as were the bodies of their children, while the labour of indentured servants was under contractual ownership of another person.
Indentured servitude is definitely not something I endorse but in the setting and the society of the time, I give the squire some points for not using enslaved people from Africa which was sadly common at the time for landowners growing sugar cane.
Later in the book, there is one reference to “slave quarters” at the family home of Beauchamps but there is no other reference to slave labour, so it seemed to me this was a reference, again, to indentured servitude. I’m a bit rubbery on this though as there is a dearth of information about this in the text.
There are certainly problematic things in Shanna. Indentured servitude is bad. Owning a person, even “temporarily to pay off a debt” is bad. There is no such thing as a “good slaveowner”.
There are people of colour in the book, some of them servants. They all appear to be free people, treated well, respected and valued.
There is some language in the book which is objectionable, particularly in one section where there is a reference to a biracial person of colour by use of a euphemism which is not okay (starts with “m”, ends with “o”).
There are also repeated references to Native American people as “s__ages”. For the most part this notion is strongly refuted so there’s that, but still.
What I’m saying is that this book is not going to be for everyone and that’s totally fair. Possibly my love for the book stems from when I first read it and the ignorance I had then. But I felt like this book held up reasonably well, all things considered.
Anywho, Ruark comes to Los Camellos and there is a constant reminder to Shanna of a “bargain fairly struck but unmet”. Ruark doesn’t press her exactly. He’s just there, reminding her of her promise and that’s enough. He’s also gorgeous and she remembers those pants-feelings he gave her and is curious about where they may all lead. He’s also clever and quick. He designs things that make the worker’s lives better and make more money for the squire. He does odd jobs for locals in his free time. He’s actually a good guy she comes to admire for himself apart from anything else. Had they met in a more traditional manner she probably would have fallen head over heels for him.
Shanna’s battle isn’t really against Ruark. It’s against herself. Shanna had the idea of marrying a nobleman. Ruark was a convicted criminal. He denies powerful relations. He is currently a bondsman. That is not the ideal husband Shanna had in mind. Even after Shanna gives into her physical desires, she holds herself apart from him emotionally. It takes her an eon (well, about a year but it‘s a really long book!) to get with the program and admit her love. Ruark, for his part, loves her almost from the first (that is one of the best parts of the book.)
There’s a capture by pirates, travel to Virginia and revelations about whether or not Ruark was fairly condemned to hang (spoiler: he wasn’t) and who the bad guys are, revelations about connections between other cast members in the story, revelations to the squire about Shanna and Ruark’s true relationship (Orlan has no idea and it’s a messy story that starts in a gaol so that’s not a conversation Shanna has been looking forward to at all). And there’s a HEA. Of course.
The language is of its time, a little on the flowery side. Possibly I’d struggle to read it for the first time now, but the nostalgia is powerful and it brought back fond memories of the first time I read the book.
I had heard excellent things about Robin Miles and I had high hopes for the narration. I was disappointed. The narrative and her voice for Shanna were the best parts of it. She certainly had good pacing and delivered with expression and emotion. But there were many many accents required for this book and most all of the others were terrible.
Shanna was “shah-na” or “shan-a” (rhymes with manna) interchangeably for a while before settling on the latter (yay – that’s how I think it should be said). Ruark’s accent changed too – although to be fair, one of those changes was textual – he “affected an Irish brogue” for the squire when they first met. The Irish brogue was terrible though and it disappeared later without a trace. If the squire thought anything of it, it was never mentioned.
Ms. Miles is good at posh English accents. I’ll give her that.
Whatever accent she gave to Squire Trahern was like nothing I’d heard before – and not in a good way. It was certainly nothing approaching Welsh. It’s difficult to describe other than to say it wasn’t good. Squire Trahern is a large part of the book so it was impossible for me to get past it.
Hergus, Shanna’s maid, had a Scottish accent which was okay sometimes and very much not other times. Berthe, the housekeeper was Dutch but the accent given to her did not sound so to me. There were others.
The bad accents got in the way of my enjoyment of the listen. I admit I turned to my paperback for some of it and skipped ahead.
Ruark’s voice was okay sometimes and I got used to it. Shanna’s tone was a little older than her years, but I could get past that. What Shanna needed was a Davina Porter (sadly, retired, but all the best to her) or a Nicholas Boulton.
For those who want to revisit the story or try it for the first time, I’d recommend the paperback or ebook over the audio, sadly.
Grade: B-/C+
Hello Stranger by Katherine Center, narrated by Patty Murin. A new favourite author/narrator pairing.
Last year, The Bodyguard was in my best of list – not only did I enjoy the story but I adored the narration by Patti Murin – so it was a no-brainer for me to review this year’s release Hello Stranger.
Sadie Montgomery is a portrait artist, broke and desperate to get her big break. She barely squeaks by with the earnings from her Etsy shop. She lives in her studio which she’s not supposed to do as her landlord, Mr Kim, (her BFF’s father) assures her it’s not “fit for human habitation”. She refers to it as her “hovel”.
Her father is a very successful cardio-thoracic surgeon who is disappointed with Sadie’s career choice. When Sadie’s artist mother died when she was 14, he remarried very quickly thereafter. Sadie does not get along well with her stepmother, Lucinda, and positively detests her stepsister, Parker, – who is a very nasty piece of work indeed.
But things are finally looking up! Sadie is a finalist in a national portrait competition – one of 10, out of a pool of 2000 entrants. In six weeks, she has to deliver an original portrait and she has the chance to win $10,000 and finally get some success.
On the way home from buying party supplies to celebrate her making the cut, she has a seizure and is rushed to hospital. There, she is diagnosed with a venous malformation in her brain which needs to be fixed or it could be fatal. It is the same thing that killed her mother. Following surgery, Sadie is left with a condition known as “acquired prosopagnosia” – acquired face blindness. She not only cannot recognise faces (something those who are born with prosopagnosia cannot reliably do to one degree or another), but the faces themselves are a jumble of pieces, like a mixed up jigsaw puzzle or a Picasso painting. For a portrait artist, this is a disaster. The condition may or may not spontaneously resolve. It’s a lot for her to cope with.
Sadie is comforted by her beloved dog, Peanut, who is a “gentleman of certain years” and her sudden crush on Dr. Oliver Addison, the new vet at the clinic where Peanut was boarded when she was in hospital. She can’t see his face of course but she just knows he’s a looker. He’s also very kind and loves animals. Check and check.
Meanwhile, her neighbour, Joe, moves from “weasel” category into the friend zone. She thought he was a womanising creeper but as she gets to know him she realises that’s not what he is at all.
Sadie is a person who does not like to ask for help. She is always and ever “okay”. Great, even. Joe is the guy who is always willing to help. He helps anyone – even Parker, when she moves into the building largely to mess with Sadie, because she really is awful.
Over the weeks leading up to the portrait competition, Sadie has to find a way to paint a face that doesn’t look like a police sketch or a ghoul and, she has to ask for help. Both of these things are incredibly hard for her, especially because she refuses to tell most people about her face blindness. She thinks of it as a failing or a weakness and is embarrassed by it.
It’s not difficult to guess the gimmick of the story so I don’t necessarily give myself points for picking how things ended. What makes it so fun is the characters and the way the story is told.
Sadie is wonderful. She’s funny and interesting. Her flaws are realistic and understandable. She has had to learn to rely on herself since her mother died and her father essentially abandoned her (emotionally at the least) and now it is a point of pride to keep doing it. She wants to honour her mother and find some further connection to her with her painting. Just before she died, Sadie’s mother was also a finalist in this same portrait competition.
And Joe is the best. I never believed he was a creep – I figured who he was talking about in the elevator that time. He’s kind, generous, smart and good-looking. Mr Kim calls Joe “helpful” because that’s what he is. But he’s no doormat either.
The only thing I’d say is that I think the “gimmick” went on just a little too long. I began to get impatient for the big reveal. For me, it tipped over from tension to the wrong side of frustrating. But this was only very close to the end and it’s a small thing in the bigger picture (heh, see what I did there?).
Patti Murin is fantastic. I just love listening to her. She has wonderful comedic timing and perfect intonation. Katherine Center writes with humour but its often about the delivery in audio and the jokes land every time here. But it’s more than just jokes. It’s the amusing asides, the whip smart turns of phrase. Ms Center writes them and Ms Murin delivers. It’s a perfect author/narrator pairing.
Ms Murin has a great range of character voices, excellent pacing and wonderful emotion in her performance. I enjoyed listening to her so much I immediately went to Audible to find more of her work.
Grade: A
I’m over at Dear Author with a review of Dragged to the Wedding by Andrew Grey. Disappointing.
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
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