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-
