I’m over at Dear Author with a review of The Christmas You Found Me by Sarah Morgenthaler. A bit of a tearjerker but it ends well. I wouldn’t steer you wrong!
Tag: small town (Page 1 of 10)
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.
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
The Wrong Bridesmaid by Lauren Landish, narrated by Teddy Hamilton & CJ Bloom. It was okay.
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
I’m over at Dear Author with a review of Chick Magnet by Emma Barry. I loved it.
I’m over at Dear Author with a review of Georgie, All Along by Kate Clayborn. Another gorgeous book from an auto-buy author, though at times I found it a little difficult to understand Georgie’s motivation.
In His Protection by Sandra Owens, narrated by Patrick Zeller. Enjoyable romantic suspense (mostly romance) and great narration but would have liked more of the dog!
I’ve enjoyed romantic suspense by Sandra Owens before and I love dogs so In His Protection caught my eye when it popped up at Audible. Unfortunately, there’s not quite enough of the dog – Fuzz – as I’d have liked. He does have a couple of pivotal scenes but the story is not very much about him.
Tristan Church is the chief of police in Marsville, North Carolina. The county sheriff is Skylar Morgan. (I admit I don’t understand why such a small area has two separate police forces but I’ve seen it in other books so I guess it’s a thing in the US, or at least some parts of it.) When Sky came to town to interview for the job, she met Tristan in a bar and they had a hot and steamy night together – first names only (her rule). Tristan was deeply smitten from the jump but when Sky returned to Marsville and realised who they were in relation to one another professionally, she pretended they’d never met and gave him the cold shoulder. Tristan has been trying to get her attention for a year.
Sky left Florida where she held a Chief Deputy position after a bad break up with a fellow cop. That man bad-mouthed her to her colleagues and started rumours she was dirty. She faced an investigation (she was cleared of any wrongdoing – she was actually innocent) and her reputation was severely damaged. She wanted a clean start but vowed not to date another cop. And what is Tristan? Argh.
However, the attraction between them won’t go away and when they are teamed up to plan the reopening of the Marsville UFO Museum (yes, that’s why it’s called Marsville), they’re forced into one another’s company even more and Sky’s fragile shield against his charm fails.
At around the same time, her ex turns up in town and someone burns down her apartment. Plus, there’s a deputy in the county sheriff’s department who has it in for her as well and after she fires him he makes threats against her. So there is a plethora of potential suspects available. It’s soon clear that someone is after something from Sky and won’t stop until they get it. This is where my biggest bone to pick with the story arises. Sky is an experienced and accomplished law enforcement officer. When Tristan asks her not to go anywhere alone it’s only because she’s a woman. There’s just no way he’d have made the same request had Sky been a dude. And, Sky went along with it rather than calling it out as the gendered BS it was! *frowny face*
The author does turn some things around though and Sky does get to do some heroics – just not without some Special Forces officers to help. Male of course. (Tristan’s brother Kade is a Ranger. He has another brother, Parker, who is the fire chief and a talented artist.)
The problem with the plot is that for Tristan to be protective of Sky and do any rescuing (and really, rescuing is one of my very favourite things in romance!) because she’s as talented and experienced as she is, it only serves to diminish her. Not entirely and not always a lot – but enough that I noticed and it grated a little.
The push/pull of the relationship is Sky’s reluctance to get in a relationship where, if it all went wrong, she’d have to leave town and start all over again AGAIN. This a real risk for her. Tristan does not think the town would turn on Sky if they broke up but he’s 100% all in anyway and wants her to be his forever. I do like a man in pursuit romantically (and respectfully) speaking. There again, sometimes Tristan made choices to withhold information from Sky that may have spooked her relationship-wise but which she had a right to know professionally so that was a minus in his column. It wasn’t egregious though and, lucky for him, it wasn’t anything that put her at risk.
That said, Tristan also overtly recognised that she needed to stand on her own with her deputies and not interfere with her work and he did treat her with due professional respect most of the time.
The narration was really good. It’s been ages since I’ve listened to Patrick Zeller and I had to ask myself why that was. He has a great range of character voices – from Parker’s 5-year-old daughter, Everly, to the old town matriarch, Ms. Mabel Mackle, to different tones for each Church brother and beyond. His pacing and tone are great and I really liked the emotion he brought to the performance as well. Not overdone; just right.
I’m sure I enjoyed In His Protection more on audio than I would have in print because of the narration. Some of the things which bothered me about the story were easier to manage with Mr. Zeller in my ears. In fact, I liked his performance so much, I immediately went and bought another Owens/Zeller audio collaboration.
Some of the suspense plot stretched my credulity to the breaking level but I enjoyed the romance and I liked Sky and Tristan (most of the time) and I liked them together.
Grade: B-
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