Avoiding Scandals

De: Rowan Gracemill

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

After some bad choices, Sophia Mason finds herself pregnant. Out of wedlock, no less! As one of two daughters of one of the wealthiest families in Charleston, this is a horrid stain on her reputation.

When the child's father finds out she's pregnant, he refuses to marry her and set things right. Unless she can do something, her parents are determined to send her child away so that she can marry the man who got her pregnant and set her reputation right, hopefully, without much blowback on themselves.

Peter Harrington lost his pregnant wife a few years ago. It had been a horrible time in his life, but the desire to be a father has not left him. As a sheriff in a small town in Oregon, he doesn't have the time or the resources to devote time to a normal courtship.

Despite his sister's teasing, he puts an ad out in The Matrimonial Times. He puts in the ad that he is specifically looking for women who already have children for whatever reason but that he is open to other ways of having a family. He hopes that the hair-brained idea gets him something.

When Sophia finds his ad, she writes to him pleading her case. Will she be able to clean up her mess, or will her parents win out on this one? Will Peter ever find love, or will he be doomed to remain a bachelor in Oregon?

Read "Avoiding Scandals" now to find out...

Debutante Mail Order Bride

The Story
Pros: This novel was a slice of time in the characters lives & it worked well in the short 2-hour format. I appreciated that the author didn’t try to describe every character’s story & background in detail. The plot seemed to be an original one for the mail-order bride trope. (I haven’t read a lot of them.) It centers on a pregnant debutante who becomes a mail order bride in order to keep her child.
Cons: Some of the story was unrealistic. That’s okay because it is fiction and only two hours long. I have more of an issue with the modern language. For example, the heroine’s mother was described as “freaking out.” That phrase was unknown the 1800s. It came into use as slang in the 1960s. It’s a little disconcerting to trip over it in a historical romance.
The Narration
Pros: Virtual voice was more pleasant to listen to in this story than some of previous VV recordings I’ve heard. The cadence and emotional inflections were better and sounded more natural.
Cons:
The mispronunciation of words like “pelisse,” “on dit,” “haut ton,” “modiste,” “chaise,” “demi monde,” “cabriolet,” and “toilette” is grating and seems to happen across the board in HRs narrated by virtual voice.
Isn’t there an audio editor on staff who is familiar with 19th century vocabulary and knows who how to pronounce the French words that were commonly used at that time?
It seems like it would be easy enough to make those corrections to the virtual voice program & would be a big improvement in the listening experience.