Musings on Romance

Tag: contemporary (Page 9 of 118)

Hard Job by Annabeth Albert, narrated by Kirt Graves

Hard Job by Annabeth Albert, narrated by Kirt Graves. Enjoyable but not my favourite.

Hot muscly white guy with a close-trimmed black beard wearing a black tank. A concert stage is in the background.

Hard Job is the second book in Annabeth Albert’s A-List Security series. This time, Duncan Lubov finds his HEA with rock star Ezra Moon.

The first book in the series, Rocky Start, Duncan’s younger brother, Danny, ended up with Duncan’s good friend and contemporary, Cash. It was a best friend’s younger brother, with a bit of age gap story. This time it’s younger brother’s best friend (Ezra is Danny’s BFF) and age gap.

There were enough similarities to the storyline that some of the conflict felt forced to me. For instance, why would Danny react badly to finding out Duncan and Ezra are together? He didn’t like it much when Duncan reacted badly to him being with Cash – but then he did the same thing!

Duncan owns A-List Security and is trying to grow the business. He is the son of a famous and notorious movie producer/director who has had multiple marriages and scandals. Duncan wants nothing to do with dear old dad and actively tries to avoid trading on the Lubov name.

Ezra and Danny used to be a on a TV show called “Geek Chorus” – I imagine it to be something like Glee – and have remained friends. Ezra went on to become a successful rock star with his band We Wear Crowns but he’s in trouble with his record label after an incident where a fan was injured at a concert. Ezra is in need of new security and does not wish the record label to choose who that is. Danny persuades Duncan to do the job personally.

Duncan ends up joining the We Wear Crowns tour and is therefore in close proximity to Ezra. Each has secretly been attracted to the other for some time and Duncan is a closet Crowns fan. Duncan doesn’t believe in love and relationships, having seen the example of his father and is generally a reticent type of guy. Ezra grew up with loving and supportive parents and is extroverted and open.

After some initial differences, Duncan and Ezra give in to their attraction. Duncan does not want to get a reputation for sleeping with his clients and does not think there can be anything long term for them anyway, so they keep it a secret.

Over the course of the remainder of the tour though, their feelings deepen and grow. But Duncan is stuck on what people will think if he’s in a relationship with Ezra. Ezra is hurt that Duncan puts his business and rep over their happiness.

I admit I was a little lacking in sympathy for Duncan here. I didn’t quite see how it was a big deal for him to be in a relationship with Ezra. In fact, I thought it was better that it was an actual relationship rather than just having a fling.

Duncan and Ezra were both likeable enough but there wasn’t anything in the story which truly grabbed me. It was enjoyable enough but it didn’t wow me.

Kirt Graves’ narration was good but there were a few vocal errors and a couple of instances of unusual (to me at least) pronunciation. Also, and maybe this is just me, but it sounded like Mr. Graves spoke with this jaw clenched sometimes and that was not my favourite. I found it easy to tell when Ezra or Duncan was speaking – the character voices were well differentiated – and the emotion and pacing was fine too. Like the story, the narration was enjoyable but not a standout.

Grade: B-

The Wrong Bridesmaid by Lauren Landish, narrated by Teddy Hamilton & CJ Bloom

The Wrong Bridesmaid by Lauren Landish, narrated by Teddy Hamilton & CJ Bloom. It was okay.

Blue cover which is a combination of illustrated (titles and background - which is a very large cupcake in a teal and white) with a picture of a hot couple in wedding party clothes leaning against one another back to back. They appear to be standing on the cupcake.

 

Wyatt Ford returns to the small town of Cold Springs for his brother’s wedding. His brother, Winston, said please. That’s the only reason Wyatt deigned to return after leaving town after dropping out of college. He wanted to get away from the Ford family influence and make his own way in life. But Hazel Sullivan, BFF of the bride (Avery) has Wyatt rethinking his plans in The Wrong Bridesmaid.

A large portion of the town of Cold Springs regards the Ford name as an epithet nowadays. Wyatt’s father, Bill, the mayor is no longer popular. He has spent too much time and effort in supporting his brother Jed, a developer who wants to make a lot of money and doesn’t much care who he hurts while he does it. Jed’s latest scheme will see families turned off their farms to make way for a new housing development and there is a significant protest movement about it.

Wyatt has no idea of course but he walks smack bang into the middle of the controversy when he comes back to town. Hazel and her family are solidly team no development and, to add to the angst, Hazel’s beloved Aunt Etta is #NotOverIt about her breakup with Jed decades before when they were engaged and he cheated on her with her best friend.

You’d think then that there would be more resistance to a relationship between Wyatt and Hazel but such resistance as there is is over fairly quickly. Wyatt proves himself to be no friend of Jed’s and he’s clearly his own man.

The attraction between Hazel and Wyatt is off the charts so after a bit of dancing around one another, they can’t help but give in.

The conflict then becomes mostly about the development and the upcoming town council meeting which will vote on rezoning to make way for Jed’s housing estate and just a little bit about whether Wyatt will be leaving town to return to his bespoke carpentry business. (Apparently Wyatt can just leave his business for weeks on end and this isn’t a problem.)

The romance is fairly low conflict once it gets going which I liked but the story itself was fairly generic. Nothing offensive or bad, but nothing particularly new or fresh either.

The narration was better than the story but that’s to be expected with performers the calibre of Teddy Hamilton and CJ Bloom. Both are very experienced and talented, with a good range of accents and character voices, great timing and tone. But even as good as they were, I still found myself interrupting the listen for other things – podcasts or music – because the story wasn’t holding my interest.

I can’t complain about the narration – there was nothing wrong with it. The performances were very strong. But the story’s path felt well-trodden and a little tired.

I did like that Hazel was something of an unusual character; confident, sex positive, tough and self-sufficient and a shark at pool. But overall, The Wrong Bridesmaid was just okay for me.

 

Grade: C

Ex Appeal by Cathy Yardley, narrated by Jenapher Zheng and David Lee Huynh

Ex Appeal by Cathy Yardley, narrated by Jenapher Zheng and David Lee Huynh. Not as successful for me as the previous book in the series and the narration was just okay.

Illustrated cover of a dark-haired Asian American man looks over his shoulder at the fair-haired white woman sitting behind him who is also looking back over her shoulder at him. They are surrounded by a love-heart made of a boa constrictor on one side and a plant (vine) on the other and a turtle, fish and a lizard.

 

Last year I read book two in Cathy Yardley’s Ponto Beach Reunion series – Gouda Friends – and loved it so I was keen to try book three (I have yet to backtrack to the first book but I’ve heard good things). I decided to try Ex Appeal on audio because why not, right?

The “Nerd Herd” is a group of friends from Ponto Beach California who went to school together and have remained close. Vinh and Tam Doan are twins. Tam’s HEA came with Josh in Gouda Friends. In that book I learned that Vinh had dated Emily MacDonald throughout high school and into college but they had split up very acrimoniously. Vinh had stayed in New York after college and worked in a high powered finance job. Emily returned to Ponto Beach and they had not seen each other since the break up apart from at their 10 year high school reunion. It did not go well.

Emily is an amateur hacker. She came from money but when her father died shortly before she and Vinh broke up, she returned home to find that the family were deeply in debt. Emily has taken on the role of family caretaker. This includes being responsible for the drain that is the money pit of the family home. Emily’s mother is flighty and not terribly competent. She’s never had to be; first her husband looked after her, now it is Emily. Emily’s dream of becoming a professional “white hat” hacker went by the wayside because there was no money to pay for the necessary qualification. Instead she picked up a series of low-paying call centre helpdesk jobs.

While Emily struggled career-wise, Vinh’s star continued to rise. He’s making a lot of money and toeing right up to the ethical line to keep his client’s finances how they like them. He’s been made a vice-president of the company he works for and things are looking good for him. If he’s lonely and isolated, well that’s just his life.

Things take a turn when the book begins, about a year after the 10 year reunion which (I believe) started off the series. One of Vinh’s big accounts is missing $10 million. Only Vinh has access to the account. Suddenly instead of being successful, he’s suspended and accused of stealing. He heads home to Ponto Beach for “Friendsgiving” to lick his wounds and make a plan. In order to prove his innocence and get some payback (hopefully) against whoever hacked his account, Vinh asks Emily for help. He knows, despite everything, that he can trust her.

At first, Emily is not just “no” but “hell, no” but she quickly sees that Vinh is in a world of trouble. She’s soft-hearted. As much as Vinh broke her a decade earlier by splitting up with her and putting his career before their relationship, she cannot stand to see him lose his career and potentially more, when she can help. She’s not above a bit of payback herself while she’s at it though. So she makes a deal with him; she’ll help him discover who hacked his account and stole the money and he has to do whatever she says. And, when it’s all over, he leaves and makes sure they never see one another again.

Vinh and Emily have never stopped loving one another. Vinh had his reasons for breaking up with Emily. Some of them were even good. I liked that neither one of them were perfect and that there was a great deal of nuance about their relationship then, what went wrong and why Vinh did what he did. But Vinh made mistakes nonetheless – neither he nor Emily were completely right or completely wrong.

As Vinh and Emily work together to clear his name, their forced proximity works its magic and they find their old chemistry is even stronger than it was.

Both have grown over the intervening decade and Emily is more open to seeing herself as part of the problem rather than the victim. Vinh is finally willing to tell Emily what really happened.

Still, Vinh is significantly career-driven and is quite single-minded about it. The core conflict harks back to their original breakup – will Vinh finally choose Emily over his career?

The subplot involving Vinh’s work and the trouble he’s in was resolved by a bit of deus ex machina which felt a little bait-and-switchy. On the one hand, it is probably realistic that Emily could not have done everything on her own with the equipment and time constraints she had. On the other, the introduction of a new character whose role it was to solve the problem and nothing else felt way too convenient.

The relationship stuff was more compelling to me and more successful. I was glad that Emily and Vinh met each other halfway and had honest discussions about what they both wanted and what would make them happy.

The narration was okay. There was nothing particularly stellar about it. It was serviceable but not great. Of the pair, I preferred David Lee Huynh’s performance to that of Jenapher Zheng. Ms. Zheng had an uneven pace which did not always work for me. There were times when the flow of the sentence was interrupted which, while not actually changing the meaning of the text, made it a little harder to understand. It was the story rather than the narration which kept me listening. Even so, I did find myself taking some breaks along the way. The audiobook was one I found it easy to put aside. Largely that was due to the narration but there was some contribution from the story as well; it was too long.

I can’t say the narration was bad. But it was just okay for me. It did not particularly add to the story but it did not significantly detract from it either. We have said before at AudioGals that when it comes to audio, it’s all about the narrator/s. What makes me want to listen to a book as opposed to reading it, is all about that narrative performance. For me, I think I’ll be reading the other books in the series rather than listening.

Grade: C

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