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Crickets ruin it

Overall
2 out of 5 stars
Performance
2 out of 5 stars
Story
2 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 04-25-21

I want to sink into the sound of the waves, but the obnoxiously loud crickets ruin it.

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Trigger warning needed

Overall
3 out of 5 stars
Performance
3 out of 5 stars
Story
3 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 02-16-18

I am not generally supportive of the idea of trigger warnings for a book, but I think this one actually merits one. When you pick up a romance novel--especially one by an author who generally writes light hearted, humorous romances--you don't expect to get a long, detailed, step-by-step description of a physical assault, but that's exactly what she does here. She does a good job of getting inside the head of someone undergoing such an attack, and I think it's quite well-written, but it just is not what most people would expect from the Kristan Higgins brand and I can imagine it really affecting someone badly.

As for the rest of the book, I generally really like the Kristan Higgins formula, which this book follows (open with heroine facing some disaster, insert a lovable dog, odd family dynamics and secrets and several quirky friends, add a somewhat mysterious hero and voila--you have a KH romance). However, this time it just didn't work for me. I'm not quite sure of what didn't ring true, but something was off. I think I never really believed in any of the characters, except possibly the teenage girls. The hero, in particular, was a real cipher. We just don't get enough of him to really know him at all, and they hardly spend any time together. In fact, the book may actually have been better without that romance. It could have worked just as well if they formed a supportive friendship instead of going for the HEA. It's really more a story of the heroine coming to terms with her past and for that the romance was unnecessary. In addition, there was some really superfluous violence at the end that seemed out of character and unnecessary. Just not one of her best.

As for the narration, Xe Sands has a very particular style that I thought was fine for the first few books of KH's that I listened to, but it's a style that I have gotten very tired of.

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118 people found this helpful

Torture porn and muddled plot

Overall
2 out of 5 stars
Performance
3 out of 5 stars
Story
2 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 11-09-17

My least favorite of Ashley's Highland series. At times it felt like torture porn to me. It was just too, too much. She did not need to give us such a detailed description of his treatment at his captors' hands.

There were certainly many good things about the book, but the plot was pretty muddled--if Elliott was there to stop her wedding, why was he asleep in another chapel while the ceremony was supposed to be going on?--and it ultimately just didn't work for me. I feel like she could have written a better book with the same broad outlines of the plot and same characters. Too bad she wrote this one instead.

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2 people found this helpful

Not her best

Overall
3 out of 5 stars
Performance
4 out of 5 stars
Story
3 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 07-23-16

At the risk of a spoiler, a critical plot element in this book relies on the stupidest excuse for having sex I've about ever read.

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6 people found this helpful

Painful to listen to

Overall
2 out of 5 stars
Performance
2 out of 5 stars
Story
3 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 10-29-13

2 stars, largely based on the painfully bad narration of the first half

I normally LOVE the Molly Harper-Amanda Ronconi team. This time the narration was painfully bad--so bad that it distracted me from following the story and came close to ruining the book for me. What the hell was she thinking to go with such a broad "pahk the cah in Hahvahd yahd" Boston accent for an Irish woman? I understand that for part of the time she was presenting herself as having come from Boston, but in that case only her dialog should have featured that accent, not her first person narration.

The only way I managed to get through the book at all was because she pretty much drops that accent for the second half of the book. This allowed me to focus on the plot, which seemed particularly slapdash and full of holes. Admittedly, I don't read Molly Harper for her tightly plotted prose, but this was especially weak. There also seemed to be less wit than usual, but that may have been obscured by the horrible narration.

I'm certainly not giving up on Molly Harper audiobooks, but I will no longer view them as a guaranteed good time. Better to relisten to one of her Jane Jameson titles (which Amanda Ronconi narrates brilliantly) than to bother with this on audio.

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Even better as an audiobook

Overall
5 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
5 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 07-29-13

Even better as an audiobook. Nicholas Boulton is a fabulous narrator, perfectly capturing the desperate frustration Jervaulx suffers, as well as his innate ducal arrogance. It's a fine line to tread and he does it beautifully.

My only complaint with the book is that Maddie becomes fairly unsympathetic for a time, largely because we don't get much from her perspective during a longish stretch near the end. However, In the grand scheme of things, this is a fairly minor quibble. This is definitely not your average romance novel but well earns its place as one of the best.

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1 person found this helpful

You couldn't ask for a better narrator

Overall
4 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
3 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 06-11-13

Really a 3 star book but with 5 star narration.

In general, I love Laura Kinsale. In addition to her beautiful writing, with her you always get something just a little different, which is definitely the case here. In this case, we have hero and heroine who are both very damaged and very flawed, though in totally non-cliched ways. Unfortunately, the plot is also pretty flawed in places and the heroine is not only flawed but also pretty unlikeable through most if the book. This is a long book, with many subplots, some of which work better than others.

However, if you listen to this as an audiobook, none of that will matter because Nicholas Boulton's voice is so beautiful you wouldn't care what he was reading. It is really hard to narrate romance well, but he does it perfectly. His French is irresistible and his drunken S.T. was hilarious. He doesn't give women an annoying falsetto. He doesn't overdramatize. I will go off into cliches if I try to describe his deep, rich voice. Suffice to say, his narration is perfect.

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8 people found this helpful

Three Nights of Sin Audiobook By Anne Mallory cover art

Less sexy, more interesting than it appears

Overall
4 out of 5 stars
Performance
4 out of 5 stars
Story
4 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 03-27-13

3.5 stars

Definitely not your average historical romance. This book deals with a far grittier reality than that of ton balls and vouchers to Almacks. The protagonists are barely part of society (him) or clinging to the fringe of society (her). The book opens with Marietta going to Gabriel in desperation to ask his help in proving her 18-year-old brother innocent of a series of Jack the Ripper-like murders. Their relationship develops as she collaborates with him to search for evidence that could free her brother.

There are many things to like about this book, and the novelty of the characters and plot is a major one. Unfortunately, I was never able to warm up to Marietta enough for the romance aspect to completely work for me. Part of that may have been the audiobook narration. It was actually pretty good but it's possible that the portrayal of M wasn't as sympathetic as it could have been and that influenced my perception of her. I would also be interested to see what their life would look like a few years down the road, because their HEA seems a little fragile. It's great that they recognize that they love each other, but how are they going to make a life together?

The climax of the book was heartbreaking and will stick with me for a long time. I don't want to say much else about it in order to avoid spoilers.

Finally, the cover and title seem to promise one kind of book, while what we get is far different and, in my opinion, better. I can see someone being disappointed if they were expecting a very hot historical and got this complex, psychologically gripping murder mystery instead.

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Another fun Molly Harper

Overall
4 out of 5 stars
Performance
4 out of 5 stars
Story
3 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 03-27-13

3.5 stars

Another fun Molly Harper. Similar to Susan Elizabeth Phillips, she puts her characters through hell, often leaving them desperate and broke in some unlikely location, only to let them claw themselves back for their HEA. I'm not always a big fan of gratuitous protagonist suffering, but like SEP, Harper seems to make it work.

I have two quibbles with the book, one with the narration and one with the story: First of all, Colin's voice was not very masculine. It made him sound like a wimp, even though he wasn't. Pretty unsexy. This was a shame because the rest of her narration was perfect.

Mild spoiler ahead:
My second quibble is the heroine's actions toward her former fiance. Yes, he was a total scumbag and he probably deserved a great deal of psychic pain, but breaking someone's nose is just not funny. A good way to test this is to ask, would it have been funny if the characters' sexes were reversed? No one would ever try to play a man breaking a woman's nose for laughs, under any circumstances, and I thought it was offensive here too. Ineffectual attempts at violence by a woman toward a much stronger man can sometimes be mildly funny, but a broken nose isn't ineffectual violence. This made me dock the book by a whole star.

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The good and the bad of Courtney Milan

Overall
4 out of 5 stars
Performance
4 out of 5 stars
Story
4 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 03-26-13

I re-read (re-listened to) this book recently and found that it had all the things I love as well as all the things I kind of hate about Courtney Milan books. First, the hate: it dragged. The ratio of action--which I would define as anything at all happening, if only a conversation--to interior monologue and exposition of the characters' thoughts and motivations was just too low. The story ground to a halt all too often. And this from me, a person who loves Mary Balogh's books, a writer who spends a lot of her time describing the same events from everyone's perspective and then rehashing reactions and motivations, so I actually have a very high tolerance for slow paced, cerebral romances.

I have also come to the conclusion that the novella is Courtney Milan's best format. She writes such beautifully crafted shorter works that it always feels to me that her novels are bloated by comparison. That is definitely the case in this, her first novel.

My other major problem was how isolated Jenny was. For all we're told of what a warm person she is, we don't see any evidence that she had any friends in London. The Madam Esmeralda persona might have made it difficult to allow anyone too close, but it's hard to believe there was no one besides Ned she'd really consider a friend, particularly since she schools Gareth in the art of friendship.

As for the good, well, she writes beautifully and does an almost too-good job of conveying lower class poverty and desperation. She also does a particularly nice job of depicting a socially awkward hero, not someone whom we diagnose in hindsight with our 21st century knowledge (as opposed to Ned, who is clearly bipolar), but someone who is simply ill at ease with small talk and never has known how to relate to people. I also loved how she shows that as a fortune teller, far from being a fraud, Jenny actually provides a valuable service to her customers in acting almost as a therapist, decades before such an idea would even emerge. I'm glad I revisited this one.

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5 people found this helpful