I shoulda known that glomming J Crusie audio books wasn't necessarily going to be a good idea - sooner or later I had to find one that didn't rate 5 stars, and this was it.
The story and humor and writing were all classic Crusie but for some reason, they didn't work for me. There was the annoying sister - was she older or younger? I dunno, but she kept trying to run Lucy's life. There was the obligatory dog(s) - all strays, all with one or more weird traits. The usual "he's/she's not my type" type of relationship.
And I do want to put in here - recently I've read a few teacher heroines, and the assumption seems to be that teachers, especially of younger children, are thought of as saintly and prudish. My experience with teachers says this is about the opposite of the truth, so I'm not sure where authors get this idea!
Lucy has just divorced Bradley Porter, a man she met, married and divorced in a fairly short period of time. She came in and caught him entertaining a woman - a woman who told her she and Bradley had been having an affair. She immediately threw him out and her annoying sister got her a lightning fast divorce, after which Bradley seems to disappear.
Lucy runs into Zack, the cop on the case of an embezzler named John Bradley, when Zack hears Lucy tell her sister she is going to "get rid of Bradley" meaning his stuff. Zack assumes the worst, and Lucy does as well, assuming he is a mugger. She promptly beats him up with her book bag and runs off.
Of course, Zack is our hero, so he has to chase her down and move in with her to protect her, since it appears - to Zack's instincts - someone is trying to kill her.
Oh, going any further will just start to introduce spoilers, so suffice to say - surprise - they fall in love, and there's some obstacles and there's a HEA.
The narrator is Elenna Stauffer. She has an ok voice for narrating - she is able to tell the story pretty straight-forward-ly and interestingly. Her sister voice was odd - why would Lucy's sister have a Brooklyn accent when Lucy doesn't? Her other male voices weren't horrible, but somehow she managed to do only one voice worse than the hero's, and that was Bradley's voice which was damn awful. I think Zack's was higher pitched and younger sounding than Lucy's, though. She tried to give him some kind of a raspy voice, which made it sound more like he was going through voice change. In general, she has a good voice for story-telling, so maybe she'll learn how to produce male voices at some point.
I guess that probably made my rating go down too, so I liked it ok - 3 stars - but it's a disappointment to love 2 in a row then... this...
No comments:
Post a Comment