Narrated by Therese Plummer
This is a new series from Carr, but don’t be confused: it’s a sort of spinoff from the Virgin River series, with references to Jack and his bar, and the Riordan fellows. In fact, it’s as if Carr is just recreating Virgin River on the Oregon coast. She sends the Main Hero (Cooper) to visit his old buddy Ben, who dies either accidentally or mysteriously right before Cooper arrives. Cooper is the beneficiary of all Ben’s worldly goods, a falling down bar/bait shop and a garage full of man-toy vehicles. Coop’s backstory: he has a great supportive family in New Mexico, moved around as a child, still moves around pulling his own toys, living in his RV. Never married, no kids, between jobs as a helicopter pilot.
When he gets to Thunder Point, he camps out at Ben’s to meet all the residents. There’s the sheriff deputy Mac, a single dad of three living with his aunt who takes care of them, a la Mayberry and Aunt Bea (except Aunt Lou is hot and getting some on the side). Then there’s Gina, single mom, in love with the deputy for years, and a passel of other townsfolk running the local businesses and teens going to the local high school.
The main heroine is Sarah, another single parent type, except in her case she’s actually the guardian of her much younger brother. In the Carr tradition of blending romance and women’s fiction, we learn everything about all the various residents in the town long before Cooper and Sarah even meet, which happens more than halfway through the book. I read the book in print first, then listened to it directly after – it’s a really good deal if you buy the Kindle version and the Whispersync counterpart. I actually wanted to experience it in print first because I wasn’t sure how I felt about Therese Plummer as narrator.
I wasn’t as taken with The Wanderer as I was with Virgin River – something just seemed missing. As a matter of fact, I immediately did a re-read of Virgin River to see if I could pinpoint the problem. Something about the delivery of all the various residents’ backstories in The Wanderer just seemed so devoid of emotion, so told vs shown. One of the first things I noticed in Virgin River, in comparison, was how we were shown Mel’s emotions, for instance, when she recalls how she used to wake up singing every morning until her husband died. “The music in her head went away with his death.” That one scene summed up the depth of Mel’s pain for me, and still causes me to tear up after many re-reads.
After my Kindle read, I decided this book was somewhere in the vicinity of a 3-star, average book. Luckily, the narrator Therese Plummer managed to coax an additional couple of points out of me, and by the end I was surprised to find that I enjoyed the story and her narration.
Plummer also narrated all the Virgin River series, and well, she isn’t on my personal narrator A-List. If I was using a checklist, she would get a check by everything I look for in narration. She has distinct character voices – and most of them are good and easily identifiable. She doesn’t have any annoying pattern to her narrative voice. Her men’s voices are pitched lower – not a lot lower, but enough. There was only once I winced at a pronunciation that I can’t even remember now. She is a really good and experienced narrator. However, I am the Cranky Listener, and something about her delivery and pacing, really her acting choices, just doesn’t usually work for me. It’s not something “wrong” – it’s just something that keeps me from enjoying her narration as much as I do other audiobooks – something in a place in the brain that isn’t ruled by words and checklists. I think the comparison would be like music – I may think someone has a good singing voice but I don’t really like how they sing a favorite song of mine. Eventually, however, I let that go and let her read The Wanderer to me, and she changed my mind about a story that I felt was just one emotionless info-dump after another in print. In her voice, it became the story of the residents of Thunder Point. Even the bad guys went from cardboard and two-dimensional to more believable, with more depth and more credible motives. So – props to Ms Plummer. If you are a Robyn Carr fan and especially a Virgin River fan, I think you will enjoy this audiobook.
Notable pet: Hamlet, the Great Dane (yuk yuk)
Melinda
Narration: A
Book Content: B
Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in, but really pretty tame
Violence: Minimal: some hinted at but not described in any detail
Genre: Contemporary romance/women’s fiction
Publisher: Recorded Books
