Musings on Romance

Tag: Savannah Peachwood

Walk of Shame by Avery Flynn, narrated by Robert Hatchet & Savannah Peachwood

Walk of Shame by Avery Flynn, narrated by Robert Hatchet & Savannah Peachwood.  Fun, sexy, sports romance.

Pink cover with a Barbie-type doll sitting in a cocktail in the front left foreground. The Barbie-knockoff doll's face isn't visible.

Reviewed for AudioGals.

Narrated by Savannah Peachwood & Robert Hatchet

Astrid O’Malley was dumped on her wedding day when her hockey-goalie fiancé face-timed her from the airport to tell her he’d accepted a contract with another team and therefore wouldn’t be attending their nuptials. Humiliated and devastated by both the loss of the relationship and the ensuing media storm, Astrid swore off hockey and men. Walk of Shame picks up five years later, when she meets a hot guy in the bar where she works occasionally.

Astrid has been on something of a “world sex tour”, having strict rules around acceptable interactions with men. One night only, no-one who knows where she lives, no-one who knows where she works. With Cal Matsen she finds herself breaking all her rules – repeatedly. It’s the best sex of her life and he lives right upstairs from her in the same building as the bar. Worse, she finds out he’s just been hired to coach her ex-fiancé (who has the “yips”) for the same team where her father is the head coach. The same team her father has begged her to come back to help for one final year before he retires.

Astrid has a personal organising business (more about psychology than storage) but her dad asks her to come and help the team do its best for his last season. I admit I was a little sketchy on exactly what she did for the team but she’d done the same job with the previous team (also coached by her dad) and they’d apparently worked well together. Now, her ex, Tig, is pulling the entire team down because he suddenly can’t stop easy goals. Cal has been brought in to coach Tig back to being the star he can be.

Cal played in the goalie position himself until an on-ice accident left him permanently unable to play at the elite level. He loves hockey and has done ever since he was four years old. Hockey is what he knows and loves and he’s desperate to be a part of the game somehow.

After Cal and Astrid realise who the other is in relation to the team, each resolves that they can never have sex with each other again. And each is very very bad at maintaining that resolution. Basically they can’t keep their hands off each other.

Astrid is very wary of getting into a relationship at all and the fact that Cal is associated not only with hockey but also her dad and her ex are powerful motivators. But none of those things can compete with her attraction to Cal. For his part, Cal is deeply smitten from the first and even though he knows he shouldn’t, he just can’t stay away. They think they’re hiding it but they’re pretty bad at that also.

There are some quirky characters in the cast, including a crotchety old lady who, if I understood correctly, has mafia connections, and an assistant coach who has four ex-wives and gets on well with them all. There are also cameos (or more) from characters from the Hartigans series which will be nice Easter eggs for fans. I enjoyed the tea party scene especially.

Walk of Shame was my first experience with Robert Hatchet. I enjoyed his performance very much, a little better than Savannah Peachwood’s actually. Both narrators have good character differentiation, tone and pacing. Both were solid when it came to the intimate scenes and also with emotion and humour of the book. Ms Peachwood has a good “hero voice” but I didn’t like as much, her other male character voices. Her depiction of Astrid’s dad and the other coaches weren’t as enjoyable for me as when they were voiced by Mr Hatchet. Otherwise, there wasn’t much to separate them in terms of performance or skill.

Walk of Shame was enjoyable and fun – and very sexy. Definitely not one to listen to with kids in the car! I did have some questions about how things ended up. For me, some of the textual links in the story were absent so I didn’t quite get how Cal came to the decision he did and I was surprised by the epilogue on a number of levels but overall, the audiobook ends in the win column.

 

Grade: B-

Not My Kind of Hero by Pippa Grant, narrated by Savannah Peachwood & Connor Crais

Not My Kind of Hero by Pippa Grant, narrated by Savannah Peachwood & Connor Crais. Entertaining contemporary about a newly-divorced single mother who moves to a Wyoming hobby farm to find herself and start again and the hot grumpy tenant renting the gatehouse at the end of her driveway.

Photo of the torso and lower face of a hot white guy with a neatly trimmed dark beard against a plain teal background. He's wearing a chambray shirt and dark pants. The titles are across his torso and the "Not" of the title has a line through it. Above his left shoulder is a pink lipstick kiss.

 

Not My Kind of Hero features a newly-divorced single mother who moves to the Wyoming hobby farm she inherited from her great uncle, to find herself and start again and the hot grumpy tenant renting the gatehouse at the end of her driveway.

Maisey Spencer used to be the on-screen comedic sidekick to her (now-ex) husband Dean’s home improvement show. But behind the scenes she used to do most of the work. Dean is clearly a jerk. Maisey tried to make her marriage work at the expense of being the parent she wanted to be to her daughter, Juniper (aka Juni). Now divorced, Maisey is determined to do right by Juni and put her first. Dean is disinterested in being a dad and is caught up in his new home improvement show with his new love interest.

Maisey inherited Wit’s End, a hobby farm in Hell’s Bells, Wyoming, from her great-uncle Tony. He had been the black sheep of the family but Maisey had spent some valuable time on the ranch as a teen and kept in touch (albeit sporadically) with Tony over the years. Regardless of the time they spent together, they did love each other. Also, Uncle Tony knew Dean was a jerk and expected Maisey would need a place to stay at some point in her life so he left her the farm. Which was prescient for Tony and lucky for Maisey.

Juni, aged 16 and a junior in high school, is not at all thrilled to be moving away from her friends and her familiar life. However, her old life wasn’t that great either to be fair; Juni’s friends all turned on her when Maisey’s mother was jailed for fraud (oh yeah, there’s that too). Still, Maisey has her work cut out for her to reconnect with Juni.

Flint Jackson is a high school teacher and handyman-type who is the go-to guy in Hell’s Bells when something needs doing. He rents the gatehouse at Wit’s End and has been looking after things and reporting to Maisey by email on necessary repairs, etc., in the year since Tony died. He was extremely close to Tony and judges her harshly for not attending Tony’s funeral and not visiting Tony when he was alive. Maisey apparently brings out the curmudgeon in Flint.

Flint is one of Juni’s teachers and her soccer coach. Because of a bad experience (he did nothing wrong or unethical) at a previous school, Flint has a firm “no dating the parent of a student” policy. As Flint quickly realises there is far more to Maisey than he believed from watching her old home improvement show and from his preconceptions about her, his attraction to her grows. But Juni is his student. Also, Juni hates him.

Maisey is working hard to build a life for herself in Hell’s Bells and find a place to belong. She particularly does not want to do anything which will unsettle Juni even more than she already is and she is determined to put Juni first – something she believes she failed to do for the previous six years or so as she tried to do and be what Dean wanted. As attracted as she is to Flint (once the initial tension over his preconceptions about her is dispelled), she won’t pursue a relationship and risk Juni feeling second best.

There are many quirky small town characters – Opal the local hairdresser and sage, Corey the owner of “Almosta Ranch” next door to Wit’s End and Earl, the local bear.

Tony had a reputation for taking in strays. Flint had been one of them and Maisey kind of is too. Maisey’s dream is to build a place for women who have to start again just like her and so she’s following in Tony’s footsteps.

The narration by Savannah Peachwood and Connor Crais is good, with both narrators differentiating characters well and clearly enjoying the quirky humour of the story.

There were a couple of intimate scenes where Maisey found her bliss very loudly and vocally. I’m not sure whether to feel sorry for Mr Crais for having to perform those sex noises or not but I did find them a bit cringe. I don’t have the book so I can’t read the scene to see whether it was the text or the narration, however. Regardless, they were a bit too much for this listener. Possibly luckily for Ms Peachwood, she didn’t have any of those scenes in her sections of the book.

Otherwise, the narration was smooth from both narrators, with good pacing and intonation.Not My Kind of Hero was an entertaining listen with solid narration from both performers.

Grade: B

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