The Game and The Governess by Kate Noble

Narrated by Beverley A. Crick

I haven’t had time to read all of the Kate Noble books on my TBR but I have enjoyed her earlier work, especially The Summer of You. When I signed up to review The Game and the Governess,I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the blurb, but rather went on my previous good experience of this author  In hindsight, that was a mistake. It was not that the writing was bad; my problems were with the story.

Edward Granville, the Earl of Ashby, is known to all as “Lucky Ned”. He served in the army and fought at Waterloo under the command of Captain John Turner. They apparently became friends. I say apparently because I didn’t see much evidence of actual friendship. They were at odds with one another for much of the story and their respective behaviours didn’t fit my definition of friendship.

John Turner is very resentful of Ned and proposes a wager: swap places for two weeks and see if the luck is really tied to Ned’s person or whether, as Turner asserts, it is in fact nothing more than the privilege of rank. To win, Ned needs to have a woman of good breeding profess her love for him or, obtain three specified tokens of affection from her within the two-week period. Part of the agreement is that neither man should stand in the way of the other’s façade – that is, they are not allowed to sabotage the other’s campaign. If they do, the wager is forfeit. The extraordinary sum of five thousand pounds is riding on it against Turner’s family mill – so it is not at all a trivial wager.

Ned isn’t a very nice man. He’s shallow and thoughtless and… inconsistently drawn. I had the feeling that the author was trying to make him a more palatable hero. Until the age of 12, Ned was raised by a loving and strict mother. I’d have thought she would have been largely responsible for forming his character rather than the former Earl who trained him into the nobility. The things Ned recalled of his upbringing didn’t make me sympathetic. They made me confused as to why he had turned out so badly.

The “game” is to practice a deception on people who don’t deserve to be treated so poorly but Ned and Turner don’t appear to feel any guilt or misgivings about it for a very long time. Too long. If the switch had been done to investigate/solve a crime for example, I may have had some sympathy. But their wager was silly and selfish and I found it difficult to feel anything positive for the men at all.

Ned and Turner stage their deception at Puffington Arms, which is not an inn as one might think, but rather an estate near Ned’s boyhood home of Hollyhock. Phoebe Baker is the governess there. She has cause to dislike the Earl of Ashby because of some business dealings undertaken by the earl’s former secretary that led her father into financial ruin and resulted in his death.

As a romance, this was a tough sell for me.  Ned didn’t seem very nice to start with and he spends the bulk of the book lying to Phoebe and gradually becoming (or trying to become) likeable. As the story progressed, I felt increasingly dubious that he could possibly grovel enough to deserve a HEA. In the end, the grovel wasn’t nearly enough and frankly, I thought Phoebe was better off without him.

One thing the book did well was convince me of the precarious nature of Phoebe’s employment and reputation – things put at risk by Ned’s careless behaviour.

It didn’t help that the set up took a long time and it was after Chapter 9 before Ned and Phoebe spend any significant time together.

I didn’t enjoy the narration by Beverly Crick. There were quite a few hesitations and vocal errors. The author uses asides frequently throughout the story – something I’m quite fond of usually – (did you see what I did there?) but Ms. Crick didn’t have the knack of delivering them. Instead, the sentences sounded broken and choppy.

I noticed some writing tics, something that is far more obvious on audio where I am unable to skim. Words were repeated in the same sentence or paragraph – “she wielded the broom in an unwieldy way” – and it seems to me it’s something that ought to have been sorted out in the editing process. (I speak from experience here.)

Ms. Crick doesn’t have a deep hero voice. In fact, there were times when Ned’s utterances of “Brilliant. Marvelous.” were so high as to risk shattering the crystal. This had the unfortunate effect of making it, at times, difficult to tell Phoebe and Ned apart.

One of the characters, Letitia, is presented as a femme fatale type and her tones edged into caricature on a regular basis. She also had the deepest voice of the entire cast. It was a pity she was so overplayed because I liked her very much. She is in need of financial security and sets her sights on the Earl but that is a very small sin (if sin at all) compared to those committed against her. She is actually fairly kind and not the heartless gold-digger she was made out to be.

John Turner fakes a posh London accent when he plays the Earl, but he normally speaks with a northern accent (think Thornton from Gaskell’s North and South) and this did serve to differentiate the men when they were talking to one another privately.  Generally, I thought the accents performed by Ms. Crick were pretty good. I just wish there had been more diversity in pitch between the characters.

Unfortunately, The Game and The Governess was not an audiobook I enjoyed – either in terms of content or narration.

Kaetrin

Narration: C-

Book Content: C-

Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in (but on the tame end of the scale)

Violence: Minimal

Genre: Historical Romance

Publisher: Tantor Audio

The Game and the Governess was provided to AudioGals for review by Tantor Audio.