The Lady Chosen and Devil's Bride by Stephanie Laurens *

I am choosing to lump these 2 into one review because they are both going DNF - did not finish.

I got The Lady Chosen as an audio download at audible.com some time back. I believe I mentioned it in a few posts already. I love audio books, although I don't love every audio book or narrator, and I'm pretty sure I've finished every audio book before - even the dreaded Christine Feehan Dark series, #1 and #2. I truly disliked the narrator on the Dark series, and often yanked the earplugs out of my ears in frustration because she mispronounced so many words. I even started a list of badly and wrongly pronounced words!!

I had decided that the narrator Jill Tanner on The Lady Chosen was almost as bad (but not quite) as narrator Juanita Parker of the Dark Series. Ms. Tanner's accent grated on me - I have no idea if she's a native British speaker or if she's American. But worst of all were the odd pauses - in the middle of sentences, as though the sentence ended and then just started up again.

Then I got Devil's Bride as a print book. It's on the AAR Top 100 and is the first in the Bar Cynster series that so many romance readers love. And DAMN if that trait I thought was the narrator's poor reading isn't actually a writing conceit used by Ms. Laurens. Yes, she actually ends a sentence, even a paragraph, and then starts up again with another phrase - an incomplete phrase that should have been part of the previous sentence.

Look - it isn't because it's incorrect grammar - after all, good authors can break grammar rules to create tension, mood, whatever. I'm only a stickler for grammar and spelling when it's obvious the author just did it wrong. When the incomplete phrases are used effectively to the author's advantage, it can enhance the story. I can tell Laurens uses this style of writing on purpose. Over and over. And it's damnably annoying. It's driving me nuts and has pushed both the audio book The Lady Chosen and the print book Devil's Bride into my very, very short list of DNFs.

Oh - there is one other thing about these 2 books that drove me to distraction - the heroine's lungs kept siezing. Her lungs siezed a lot when she got excited (sexually that is). I guess every author has some phrase like that she uses over and over, but that one got old after, oh, 1 time.

And Jill Tanner is hereby forgiven for trying to make Ms. Laurens' prose work as an audio book. Obviously, I'm in the minority because so many readers just love her work. Not me. DNF - 1 star.