I love romantic comedies. Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series, Kristen Ashley’s Rock Chick Series and Bridget Jones’s Diary are some of my favourite books of all time. When I was approached by this author and asked to review her romantic comedy book it would be fair to say I was pretty excited.
What do you do when the guy you’re in love with is seeing someone else?
That’s the dilemma facing Paige Taylor. All of her life she’s only ever had eyes for the gorgeous Alec Wright, but despite their undeniable chemistry, their timing has always been off. Fast approaching her thirtieth birthday, Paige despairs of ever finding love and a happy ever after. Her best friend Poppie tells her that she can either watch life pass her by, or grab it with both hands. She convinces Paige to throw herself back into the dating pool, or she could be waiting for Alec forever.
What Paige didn’t expect was the catalogue of dating disasters to follow. A neck brace, jelly fish, stitches, flashing and an encounter with a gorilla were some of the most memorable. Despite some downright hilarious, humiliating and cringe worthy dates, her biological clock is ticking and Paige is determined to keep trying until she finds the one.
Was Alec Wright always her Mr. Right, or is he still out there waiting to be found?
Join Paige in her quest to find the ultimate prize. Love.
This book starts off with a very young Paige Taylor, still in her last year of high school and already madly in love with Alex Wright. Both are from a small town in England and I thought the author set the scene very well. I could picture the quaint village and smell the crisp, clean air. She also sets up the characters in the story right from the start and it soon becomes apparent that poor Paige is a bit of a klutz and that the humor in this book was going to be very slapstick, at the expense of our poor heroine who can’t seem to catch a break where embarrassing situations are concerned.
Throughout the book, and Paige’s life she and Alec keep bumping into each other but the timing never seems quite right and I did keep going until the end wondering if she was going to end up with Alec or if someone else was going to swoop in and grab our heroine’s heart. I enjoyed the story and most of Paige’s little mishaps made me smile and chuckle.
There were however, a few things I didn’t like about the book. I’m a huge dialogue girl. Give me a hard to believe plot line where reality has to be suspended and I can go with it as long as the dialogue is smart and funny. Bad dialogue takes me out of the story faster than most anything and there were parts of this book that took me right out of the story.
“I just graduated from Leeds University, fingers crossed I’ll achieve my BA honours degree in photography. My portfolio was so strong that I’ve already been offered a job in the fashion industry, training under a prolific photographer, John Graves…”- This made me snort a bit because I don’t know many people who talk like that. Although I can see what the author was trying to do here as with a couple of sentences you do learn a lot about the person speaking.
On the next page though, the author pulled me back in again with this little piece of dialogue:
“Please, I’m Paige calamity Taylor. You’ve seen me in action. I’m the girl who gets sprayed with cow poo, falls in rivers and gets coated with mud, and snorts water all over her date. I’m not model material.” That was funny and again, gives a lot of information about the character but in a more fun and easy way than in the previous page.
Here are the other things that I DID like. The book was well-edited in that there were no glaring grammatical errors or typos. I liked the premise of the book and there were parts that were straight out HILARIOUS. Some of the fixes that Paige got herself into made me laugh out loud. I really liked her relationship with her best friend Poppy and how there was never a time that she forgot her friend or neglected her because of romance.
I don’t want to give away too much as a huge part of the fun in this book is wondering the whole way through if Paige and Alec are going to end up together and you’ll have to read it to find out. All in all, it wasn’t a perfect book but it was an enjoyable one.
Final Grade: C+
Note: I received a free copy of this book from the author in exchange for a fair and honest review
romancefangirl 
Audio Book Madness
10 NovI have to admit to being a little bit late to the whole audio book thing. I only started a few years ago when the traffic and commute to work started becoming unbearable and I needed something to take my mind off the daily grind. I THEN discovered just this year that I could download these books straight onto my phone and listen to books WHILE DOING THE HOUSEWORK. My house has never been so clean and I now clean up (semi) cheerfully while someone tells me a story.
As a sidenote, I also like the fact that now I can listen with earphones and therefore don’t have to turn the volume way down during sex scenes because of the very real fear that some stranger will hear the moaning and groaning and look at me like I’m a freak…
I’ve written before about my absolute love of Ilona Andrews and how much I adore the Kate Daniels series- in both the written and audio formats. Renee Raudman, the narrator of this series is so fantastic and I got real book hangover just from listening to these books. After finishing the last book in the series I went in to mourning for a day and then was like a junkie scrounging for the same kind addictive hit. I decided to go look for a Kristen Ashley book to go for something very different but also has that cracktastic quality and I’m so glad I did!
Audible gave me a big discount on the price of the books since I had already purchased the Kindle version so off I went into Rock Chick land. As Shirleen would say- Oooowee! I glommed onto these audio books and listened to all 8 in one month. Yup, you heard it, all EIGHT in ONE MONTH.
Susannah Jones, the narrator of the books, was very good with handling all the different characters and voices and was a younger, happier sounding narrator which fit into the whole vibe of the books perfectly. She was excellent at injecting the fun neurosis into the female characters- especially their panicked self-talk when they know they’ve gotten into trouble. I have to admit that coming off Renee Raudman’s narration and the way she did all the different voices so distinctly I sometimes felt that Susanna didn’t differentiate characters as well especially between books but that’s more about how good Renee was than any sort of lack on Susanna’s part.
I again went into mourning after finishing the last book, Rock Chick Revolution but cheered myself up trying to decide who of the Hot Bunch was my favourite. Book boyfriend fantasies aside, the next book I put into my phone was The Collector by Nora Roberts performed by Julia Whelan. Props to this reader for doing really good guys’ voices. There is nothing more distracting than a girl trying to sound like a guy and doing it badly but Julia did it so well it added to the story rather than detracting from it.
I am such a fan of Nora’s work but have to admit that I when I first read it I liked this book but didn’t LOVE it the way I did say, Birthright or Angels Fall or Naked in Death. The funny thing is that I am halfway through the book now and am utterly drawn into the story in a way that I wasn’t when I read it. It’s again proof positive that you pick up things listening to a book that you may have missed reading it.
So it looks like this love affair of mine with audio books although a late bloom may end up being an enduring one. I have only ever listened to books I’ve already read so am interested in seeing what happens when I listen to a book before reading it. Do you have any recommendations for audio books?
Tags: ilona andrews, Julia Whelan, Kate Daniels, kristen ashley, Nora Roberts, reading romance, Renee Raudman, Rock Chicks, romance audiobooks, romance book reviews, Susannah Jones, The Collector