I guess I’m just not a fan of N.R. Walker. The first thing I read by her was the Thomas Elkin series, which I absolutely loved, but everything else I’ve read of hers just falls flat for me. And I’ve read a lot, each time thinking “Well maybe THIS one will be as good as Thomas Elkin…” but being disappointed every time. The prose itself is fine, and I don’t really have any glaring complaints, it just–wasn’t going anywhere for me.
I suppose the problem is that the book is built around a meet cute that happens in the first part of the book. Once they’ve met, which they do pretty early, the main part of the plot is over. The rest of the book, or at least up until the point where I stopped, is just filling. The two protagonists fell for each other pretty much the first time they spoke, so there’s no ramping up of feelings or much question about what’s actually going to happen. There are low angst stories, which I like, and then there are ones with NO angst at all, which this is.
Dane and Griffin are not particularly distinct, which is underlined by the fact that I just had to open up another tab to check their names, which I had forgotten. Joel Leslie further complicates things by giving them roughly the same voice, so I had great difficulty keeping track of which character’s inner monologue we were being subjected to, and in fact I stopped listening to the audiobook the moment it occurred to me that it really doesn’t matter who is talking since they’re basically the same person anyway.
I know a lot of people really like Joel Leslie; I’m not one of them. Or rather, I do like him sometimes, but he’s a bit hit or miss for me. His voice is pleasant enough but it’s also very posh, and I have a difficult time when he’s voicing a character who is supposed to be very masculine. This is tempered somewhat when he’s doing an Australian accent, which he does here, and which is good, but as I mentioned earlier it’s very hard to tell who was talking.
For the most part, I didn’t hate the book or even dislike it. It simply existed, stagnant and a little saccharine. However, I do have one actual complaint and that was the character of Bernice. The moment the author introduced the character, a feisty elderly hippie who smokes pot and speaks her mind, I thought to myself “This character is going to get run into the ground.” And lo and behold, I was correct. I get the feeling the author thought she was a hoot and ended up overusing her. She’s constantly doing zany things which cause other characters to remark on her, saying “Wow, that Bernice sure is zany!” She even takes up a good deal of conversation between our two leads. I think I would have liked her in smaller doses but she’s way overused.