Elysian Dreams

Volume Two of Crescent City

By: Jack Caldwell

Narrated by: Melissa Kay Benson

Volume two of the Crescent City trilogy.

2004. Five years after the scandals of their college days, our heroines have settled down in New Orleans. Some are looking for love, some are searching for reconciliation, and others are trying to save their relationships. Happiness, heartache, and new friends are in the cards.

Meanwhile, threats from the past are still lurking. And a monster appears on the horizon.

With greater maturity come greater challenges, and the three friends learn it takes courage to seize happiness, especially in a place as magical and dangerous as the Crescent City.

Author’s note: Elysian Dreams is volume two of the Crescent City series. The story resumes five years after the end of volume one, Bourbon Street Nights. The author suggests that story be heard before this one.

©2015 Jack Caldwell (P)2019 Jack Caldwell

Loved it!

This second is just as good as the first! All anticipation for book three! Both the story and the characters are first rate

Romance and hurricane season buildup continued

In this middle volume of the 3-volume Crescent City series we see the story of the previously introduced heroines and their love interests continue, and by the end of this volume Elizabeth and Marianne find healing from the past in a happy and committed, gradually deepening relationship. Emma and George's story explores the difficulties that living with an invalid father (true to Jane Austen's setup at the end of her novel Emma) realistically means and the problems between aheart surgeon having a demanding job and a stay-at-home wife. The villains from Book 1 also continue as they began, Wickham the drug-dealing sociopath and Waguespack the weak opportunist drug consumer continue to wreak havoc in the life of our protagonists. Through the daily life of the characters we experience details of everyday life in New Orleans, with lots of culinary descriptions and music. Meanwhile, through brief descriptions of tropical storm formation, monitoring and forecast, and damages by storms prior to 2005, the tension builds up towards what we know will happen: the arrival of the monster named Katrina. This dramatic event, however, is reserved for Volume 3 - along with the villains getting their due punishments and our dear couples' final settling down, after, hopefully, they all survive the impending catastrophe. There are many threads of the story, a large number of primary and secondary heroines/heroes that the book follows, rather than a single story arch, but each of the storylines find a good place at the end of the book. Jane Austen fans will like the adaptation of her characters into modern day New Orleans and the cameo characters that are tributes to her work. I admit that this story made me long to someday discover New Orleans even though I live on another continent.
Melissa Kay Benson, whose narration I already admired in the first volume, creates the same magic in this book. It is rare to hear so many different individual voices for the numerous characters, displaying accent, character, emotional nuances perfectly. Through the wonderful narration, I felt the events come alive and became even more emotionally involved in the lives of Elizabeth, Darcy and their friends in New Orleans.

Elysian Dream

I cannot wait until Ruin and Renewal is recorded. I love the way the narrator’s voice sounds somewhat like a man, when she is doing Will And a girl when she is doing Marianne and Lizzy and all the other ladies. I am so thankful that Will finally got it together and asked Lizzy to marry him. And I am thankful that he sent her little sister and her, somewhat girlfriend to Las Vegas. He is a wonderful man, a very generous man. There is so much history in this volume. And I even learned about English Turn which I never knew!

Still Great

love the narrator she continues to. amaze me with the voices of the characters. This book is good it's a little slower than the first book. It really grabs your attention at the end making you want to read the third one. once again there's great historic facts on it not as many as the first, still interesting. I can't wait to start the third one.