Sweet Dreams

AudioBook Review: Stars: Overall 3 Narration 4 Story 3 At just under 700 pages or 25 hours listening time, these are stories to get lost in, and without the need (at least in the first two) to read in order, you can grab these for your vacation listens, perfect for beach or travel. In this story we meet Lauren. After discovering her husband is a cheater, nothing could be worse except the fact that it is her best friend was the one he chose. Yeah – major hit to the confidence there. So, Lauren packed her things and left – and after wandering about for a place to begin again, she lands in Carnal – the perfect quiet place. But she needs work, and the local bar is hiring – so in she goes. Tate is a part owner of the bar, and while they hired Lauren, he’s an utter ass with snarky side comments and a bad attitude. Let me start by saying I despise this approach in contemporary romance: bad attitude and crappy behavior to hide the ‘hurt little boy’ who then apologizes and things are ok. I expect it in historicals and give it a bit more leeway – but considering Lauren’s already damaged confidence and the treatment by her ex-husband, I was hoping for something a little bit different from the ‘I think you’re hot, and I said things I ‘didn’t mean” so forget that because I apologized and we can move on to sexy times” moments. It was a bit more than that – and as a couple, they did mostly work, but I was inclined to be hard on Tate and clench my fists when Lauren was ‘pushover easy’ for some of his antics. That being said, again I had issues here with the writing and the run-on sentences, often meandering into moments that really went nowhere, and simply added to the length, not the substance of the story. With a to frequent refrain of “I went, I did, I walked” the editing of the story needed work, and focus to make this a more manageable length for readers. However, there were engaging moments, and the story did show far more than tell, so while the story was long, it didn’t feel as if I needed to put it down frequently because I was bored. Narration is provided by Emma Taylor and she did keep each character’s voice distinct, and different, while managing to imbue them with a bit of personality, life and even humor. Even in the frequent moments of action for actions sake, she kept the listening experience engaging. With several plot twists and turns there was no overreaching with presentation tricks like pauses to signify a change, or overly pushing an emotional tone forward. I received an AudioBook copy of the title from Hachette Audio for purpose of honest review. I was not compensated for this review: all conclusions are my own responsibility.

Ah, where to begin? Well, firstly, I can see why Tate might get a lot of hate based on his behaviour, but really, he never gave me a ‘bad guy’ feel and I was never tempted to stop reading the book. I just knew and trusted that Lauren wouldn’t put up with him as is and would set him straight, and goddess, she came through. But then again, so did he. A lot, I mean a lot, happens between these two, and for a while it is more bad than good. For the next while, it is pretty close to a 50/50 split of bad to good. The good comes at the end. The good comes when they save themselves, and because of that, save each other. The good is so good, the bad isn’t forgotten, back fades to the background as a measure of how good it is now. Tate and Lauren and Carnal, and the townsfolk contained therein, were absolutely wonderful and left me very happy indeed!