Days of Gold by Jude Deveraux ***

Days of Gold by Jude Deveraux

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I'm giving this 3 stars as in "I liked it" but not more than 3 stars. However, the narration by Davina Porter was definitely 5 stars! In fact, she may have saved the book for me. I'm a sort of on-again, off-again Jude Deveraux follower - I love some of her books, and hate some. I did not particularly like A Knight in Shining Armor.

This one starts in 1766 Scotland, with a young, orphaned British heiress living with an uncle who won a Scottish keep in a game of cards with the original laird. Edelean finds herself in a number of scrapes - falling in love with a young British fellow who tries to scam her fortune; her uncle tries to marry her off to one of his old cronies, again for the fortune. She ends up being smuggled out of Scotland with her gold and the most recent laird, Angus MacTern, and the two of them cross the ocean disguised as man and wife, with false names.

Once in America, more - well, misunderstandings, some standard Deveraux story twists, a stint in the army for Angus, more scrapes for Edelean who finally creates her own business. Truly, with Davina Porter reading the story, I'm convinced it was much more likable than if I had read it in print. Her wonderful Scots accents and warm British accents are so delightful (and having listened to literally dozens of hours of her voice I feel I can say that!). I'll say this: Deveraux is no Gabaldon!

Still, it was an enjoyable (enough) listen.

Trouble in High Heels by Christina Dodd ****

Trouble in High Heels by Christina Dodd

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was a fun romp! It's the first in the Fortune Hunter series, and I read #3 first, and found it just ok. The genre must be suspenseful romantic comedy because it had moments of each.


Brandi had just moved to Chicago - in the winter - to be closer to her fiance Alan. She also just got a job with a prestigious law firm in Chicago, which she would start in just a few days. While having trouble getting settled in, what with frozen water pipes and a mistake in her furniture order, she received a call from Alan: he'd just gotten married in Las Vegas. In revenge, she pawned the engagement ring and spent it all on getting ready for a big charity ball she would now be attending alone. The revenge plan: pick up a man and spend the night forgetting all about Alan.


Roberto was that man: an Italian count rumored to be an international jewel thief. He was perfect except for one small detail she learned on her first day at work: she was his lawyer.

The narrator is Amanda Ronconi, a new-to-me narrator with 19 listings at audible.com. I liked her regular reading voice and her female characters a lot, her male voices and especially her Italian-accented male voices somewhat less. The gravelly/throaty voices and not-very-authentic foreign accents didn't work for me very well.

I think this story has the absolute best grovel scene I've ever read, and the last 20 minutes or so were pretty funny as I imagined what the scene looked like.

Call Me Irresistible by Susan Elizabeth Phillips*****

Call Me Irresistible by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I loved it! I was very happy with the new narrator, Shannon Cochran, too - she almost rises to the level of Kate Fleming/Anna Fields, and although I haven't done a re-listen to the earlier books in a while, I felt like her voices were close enough to the originals.

This is Ted and Meg's book, although when you start, it's Lucy Jorik from First Lady as the bride. Lucy's best friend Meg seems to be the only one who can tell that Lucy and Ted aren't the love-match everyone thinks, and encourages Lucy to follow her heart. Lucy does exactly that - jilting Ted at the altar! Of course, Meg is such a blunt screw-up that she ends up taking the blame, which everyone in Wynette, including Ted, heaps on her. Meg, whose parents have cut off the money to force her to take responsibility, realizes she's stuck there with no money, forced to work at whatever she can find and live out of her car until she can repay the hotel. Over the next several weeks, Meg experiences what Ted's mother Francesca did in her own story (Fancy Pants) - the growth of self-esteem from doing a job well.

It really was such fun to revisit all the citizens of Wynette and the original stories - I was almost disappointed when Lady Emma was mentioned reading Beatrix Potter because I expected her to be reading Daphne The Bunny books! Of course, that was a completely different series, but then how did Glitter Baby, What I Did For Love and First Lady get into the golf series??

I did have the slightest quibble with Cochran's narration - I mean, really I liked it a LOT, and I felt like she followed in Anna Fields' footsteps well. I even thought she sounded a little bit like SEP herself, having heard her in online videos. There were some passages that seemed to drone on and on that she could have livened up somewhat, but overall her voice suited the story well. I'm not sure if I had read the other stories right before this that her other characters would have fared all that well - hearing them sound different might not have worked, but they did seem to match well enough what was in my head.

Let Sleeping Rogues Lie by Sabrina Jeffries ***

Got this in audiobook for a "mini review" for the Speaking of Audiobooks at AAR. Didn't like it any better in audio - narrated by Justin Eyre, who I did like. What follows in my original review here from April 2009:

I can't believe I read this one out of order!! It's actually #4 in the series after Beware A Scot's Revenge which I read last.

This one was just average/mediocre - the whole setup/premise was a little too contrived for my taste. First, the prim schoolteacher and the rake are the protagonists - (yawn) - and the prim schoolteacher has a dark secret she cannot reveal about her father, and wants to use the rake to get the resolution, so she arranges for him teach Rake Lessons at the school (this is the School For Heiresses series) to prove he can be a responsible guardian. Yes, if you are thinking "WTF?" like I was, then we agree on the premise: it's inane. It's something about his being desperate to be the guardian of his niece to protect her from his aunt - so desperate, he'll teach the lessons; meanwhile, Ms Prim Schoolteacher is also desperate, hence her convincing Mrs. Harris to allow his niece to attend if he'll prove he's responsible.

Because of her so-called "dark secret", she pretty much lies throughout to the rake - and yet she expects him to be honorable?? Once she finally gets what she wants - well, whatever, it sorta became The Big Misunderstanding - meanwhile, he's immediately attracted to her like he has never been before to any other woman, in spite of his reputation and vast experience. Doesn't that get old after a while? So he has to have her, whatever it takes and...

Jeffries writes an enjoyable enough story but this one pushed my "so what" buttons, hence the 3 stars.

Thigh High by Christina Dodd ***

This is another of my "mini review" books I did for AAR's Speaking of Audiobooks - it was just a 3 star listen, but the first in the series was better - Trouble in High Heels - so I do plan to read the others. The review:

Thigh High by Christina Dodd

Narrated by Natalie Ross

When Jeremiah “Mac” MacNaught goes undercover in New Orleans for the bank he owns, he’s got a major lust-on for his bank’s employee Nessa Dahl but he’s also convinced she’s behind the annual Mardi Gras robberies, something he finds detestable. Nessa is working hard to help her eccentric great-aunts get out of debt, which is hard to do when her immediate boss is almost as difficult to work for as the bank’s owner. She’s assisting Mac (in disguise as the insurance inspector) in solving the robberies.

I rate narrator Natalie Ross a cut above run-of-the-mill, and her southern accents are generally good. I really enjoyed her narration of a Linda Howard favorite, After the Night, also set in Louisiana. She articulates Thigh High’s characters with age and gender-appropriate voices, even if I do have a quibble with some pronunciations and out-of-place or overdone local accents (I lived in south Louisiana). But these aren’t just characters, they are Characters. That being said, when a narrator is faced with the aunts from Arsenic and Old Lace, how else could she go about creating them in audio?

Christina Dodd is a new-to-me author and I wondered if her style in writing this Romantic Suspense was intended to be beyond-quirky comedy, or more like Linda Howard, whose realistically drawn characters are often in extremely humorous situations. I did laugh out loud a few times, but generally, the story veered sharply away from realism with the antics of heroine Nessa’s aunts. Was it comedy or tragedy? Suspense or allegory? Even after it was over, I couldn’t make up my mind. But the combination of intermittent humor with stock characters, love scenes that seemed without sufficient motivation, and a creepy villain not associated with any of the ongoing conflicts had me confused and kept this story from rising above a C for story.

Narration: B

What A Rogue Desires by Caroline Linden *****

I love a Besotted Hero!! And finally, a book in the series that makes me glad I glommed it.

This particular hero is the Evil Twin from What A Gentleman Wants, David Reece. In that book, he is the very epitome of a rake, spending his fortune on debauchery and drunkeness, leading his friends astray at every turn, and ending up being tended by a virtuous vicar's widow in a small town when his carriage is overturned during a race and his leg is severely broken. Even then, when he seems to be on the verge of a Come To Jesus moment, he -well, what is the opposite of repents? and plays a dastardly joke on the widow and his identical twin, the Duke of Exeter. Of course, in Romancelandia, all is well and the duke and the widow have a HEA.

In this one, the Come To Jesus moment revisits him, and he is tasked with keeping the family business going (you know, whatever it is dukes have to do) while his brother and new wife tour the Continent on their honeymoon. But Linden doesn't reform David quickly - he is sorely tested in the first days when his horse goes lame, delaying his return to London and putting him in harm's way. The public transport he is forced to take is robbed, and the signet ring his brother had made for him stolen. The ring is a sort of talisman for him, the symbol of his adulthood and the responsibilities he knows he should shoulder, and he does everything he can to get it back.

The first order of business is to grab the thief, which in this case turns out to be our lovely heroine, Vivian. Linden builds a credible background for her as the half-Irish orphan raised as a Dickensian pickpocket, now in the company of highwaymen. On impulse, David virtually kidnaps her and holds her captive, trying to bully the information about his ring out of her.

This is where the beauty of the story unfolds - he has finally met his match, which isn't so uncommon a theme in romance. What makes it unique is the journey - and this is where authors can shine or can follow the lemmings into the sea. Linden shines in creating a believable relationship - a woman wary of the power David holds, both physically and as a "gentleman" of the ton; a man determined to show everyone he can be as responsible as his brother, but who fails and fails in this at every turn. She has them slowly (well, not really that slowly but at least not overnight!) come to know each other as human beings, and during this process David falls head over heels in love, becoming ever the besotted hero. The small things that bring joy to Vivian become important to him and he wants nothing more to continue to bring her joy.

Even the final conflict works very well into the story - it comes from moments laid out earlier in the book, even in the previous book, that fall into place. I didn't feel "where did that come from?" when it happened, neither did I feel "I saw that one coming 5 miles away".

I finished this at 3 am this morning, big old grin on my face but too tired to jump up and write a review. Now here it is. 5 stars!

Seducing An Angel by Mary Balogh ***

Seducing an Angel by Mary Balogh

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Listening to Flosnik read Balogh about the Huxtables is getting on my last nerve. Between the plodding, metronome-timed-sounding narration and the (author's) characters' annoying habit of waaaaay-too much introspection in the form of multiple questions in a row and over-analyzing what-ifs, I've had it up to here [imagine my holding my hand at top of head level] with this combination!

This, the 4th in the 5-book series, is Stephen's story, and he is the angel in question, and the seductress is an alleged axe murderess. He's rather goody-two-shoes and wishy-washy, all in all; she's a widow (remember the axe murder part?) who needs a protector. She sets her sights on him as the one...

Balogh describes the heroine's seductress voice as her "velvet voice" and Flosnik developed an even more annoying tone for that, if you can believe it. But Stephen (hero) and Cassandra (heroine) seem to be fated to be together. Her alleged murder-by-axe is really the most ton-shocking behavior of the 4 siblings, out-doing even the fellow who jilted his bride on the wedding day by running away with her sister-in-law. But things are never quite what they seem, are they?


I think Flosnik has either improved some since book 1, and even there she was not quite as annoying as her Lowell and Garwood medievals, or I am getting slightly accustomed to her plodding, metronome speaking tempo. However, there were still long portions that I talked out loud to her and Balogh: Stop it!

I'm still wondering if it's because I have to listen to Flosnik read it or if Balogh has got a very overdone, tiring way of using character's inner monologue to really beat a dead horse every several pages or so. The character thinks: perhaps I should have worn the red dress. If I had worn the red dress, then he would have seen me and I wouldn't have had to search him out. But perhaps it would have been better for him not to see me, so wearing the gray dress was the better way. Unless wearing the gray dress was what caused her to run into me, so perhaps I shouldn't have worn the gray dress, and should have worn the red dress instead. But perhaps the green dress....

(no, it was never about a dress, but it does go on and on and ON AND ON ad nauseum .)

And questions: Did he think of me? Was it just me imagining him thinking of me? Or was he just looking out the window? And if he was just looking out the window, does he ever think of me? Or could I be fooling myself that he thinks of me?

AD NAUSEUM

I did, I spoke outloud to the audiobook: "NO NOT AGAIN!" I would say when this happened for the umpteenth time. The ending was ok - it almost made me give it a half star more.