Four Friends: A Novel

Audiobook review: Performance – 4 Story – 5 Overall – 5 I loved this book and I couldn’t stop listening once I started it. If you love Robyn Carr’s Virgin River series do not expect this book to be like those. I love that series so much but they are what I would call Contemporary Romances; I would classify Four Friends as Women’s Fiction. It deals with some pretty heavy subject matter but so does real life and this story felt very realistic to me. If you’ve read the blurb you already know that Gerri’s marriage has big problems. Some readers will fail to understand how Gerri could ever forgive Phil but I know people who have been through it and survived. Several aspects of Gerri’s story really resonated with me. I liked that this book was about more mature characters, even though some of them didn’t always act their age. The blurb really gives you all of the details you need but it can’t convey the depth of the story. I wasn’t really prepared for the emotional reaction I had to a lot of the things that were dealt with. I have family members who suffer from clinical depression so what happened to Sonja really tore me up. I’ve listened to several other Robyn Carr books narrated by Therese Plummer and I’ve enjoyed all of them. This one bothered me just a bit because I had trouble distinguishing some of the male characters from each other. Fortunately, the way the story was written helped me with that. I had recently finished listening to the excellent Return to Virgin River and when a couple of the male characters in this story spoke, I kept hearing Jack from that book. This isn’t the fault of the narrator, it’s not possible for any narrator to have unlimited voices. As it is, I’m amazed at how well Ms. Plummer does male voices. What the experience taught me though, is that I should allow more than a couple of days between books if I’m going to listen to another one performed by the same narrator. 😊 A complimentary copy of this audiobook was provided to me by the publisher but my review was voluntary and not influenced by the author and/or narrator.