Saturday, October 4, 2008

The Indiscretion by Judith Ivory *****

I listened to this on my iPod on the plane trip to Cairo, Egypt, and WOW! It's truly a new top favorite, maybe top 3 with To Die For (LH) and A Season To Be Sinful (JG). To be honest, I think Barbara Rosenblat's incredible narration raised it ABOVE what I might have felt about reading it! Her Sam Cody voice was a masterpiece and her Liddy simply perfection - a heroine who could have been read as spoiled and willful came across as whimsical, credible, witty - really, delightful, even when she was being really too hard on Sam.

Plot redux: Texas cowboy and titled Brit heiress meet in a coach on the moor. It's 1899 - the driver falls off at some point, a few miles later the coach is wrecked, and as the only passengers, they have to spend 4 days roughing it before being rescued. Miss Prissy Brit is none too honest about her background, and later we learn Sam, while technically honest, wasn't as forthcoming as he might have been about his. Part I is on the moor, where they develop a friendship and then step beyond the boundary (The Indiscretion, as it were). Part II is, well, the reckoning of all their actions - the truths, half-truths and outright lies as well as The Indiscretion itself.

I laughed out loud several times - again, Rosenblat's narration was so - perfect - I can't even describe it. She flipped from hung-over, raspy Texan male drawl to prissy Brit aristocrat to common ladies' maid to stuffy Brit boyfriend to... well, she nailed every character. Even her intake of breath was meaningful in her narration.

There was an odd background noise that, if I recall, some reviewers on audible.com thought was the narrator sucking on candy. I have no idea what that noise was (papers rattling?) but there's no way it was Rosenblat making that noise, because she speaks and breathes while the noise is being made.

5 stars and definitely worth a re-read! (update, 2/23/09, I did do a re-read/listen!)

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