All the Ways to Ruin a Rogue by Sophie Jordan

Narrated by Carmen Rose

All the Ways to Ruin a Rogue is the follow-up to Sophie Jordan’s A Good Debutante’s Guide to Ruin, and having really enjoyed the sexually-charged interactions between two of the secondary characters (one, the heroine’s friend, and the other a childhood friend of the hero), I was looking forward to their story with great anticipation. I rather like the enemies-to-lovers trope, and while I do have some quibbles with this particular book, if you’re looking for a story about a couple whose pointed and sometimes cruel barbs barely conceal the fact that they’re dying to rip each other’s clothes off, then it’s definitely worth looking at in print. In audio, however, I confess to being very disappointed.

Max, Viscount Camden, lost his family in tragic circumstances when he was very young, and practically grew up with Will, the Earl of Merlton, his younger sister, Aurelia and their cousin Declan. Max was always kind to Aurelia, letting her tag along with him and his friends, and, as she grew older, encouraging her to develop her talent for drawing. By the age of nine, Aurelia was head-over-heels in love, and just waiting for the day when Max would see her as a woman rather than his best friend’s little sister. She’s fifteen when her illusions are shattered; inadvertently intruding upon Max tumbling a housemaid, Aurelia is devastated, and vents her frustration in her artwork, producing a cruel caricature of Max which is found accidentally by his friends and for which he is mocked mercilessly.

The animosity between the two only grows over the years, so that it is impossible for them to be in each other’s company without throwing insults that aren’t even thinly veiled – yet Max hasn’t been able to help noticing that Aurelia has turned into a rather voluptuous armful, even if the clothes her mother makes her wear do nothing for her. When Will announces that he and his wife are expecting, Aurelia is brought to face the reality of her situation. Unmarried at twenty-three she is dangerously close to being on the shelf, and hasn’t long if she is to find herself a husband to avoid becoming a burden on her brother and his young family. And without a substantial dowry, she can’t afford to be too choosy.

Of course, Max is appalled and thinks that neither of her potential suitors is good enough for her, continuing to needle Aurelia until their acid tongues are suddenly put to much better use in an explosive kiss. The story proceeds as one would expect, with Max trying desperately to deny the intense attraction he feels towards his childhood friend, and Aurelia trying to tell herself that she’s not nine any more, and that she will have to settle for what she can get.

I read the book a few months ago, and enjoyed the story in spite of a number of reservations. Max is your stereotypical “I’m never going to get married because love hurts” rakish hero, and actually says some rather nasty things to Aurelia on several occasions. He does have his better moments, of course, but then he goes and says or does something that turns him right back into a prize arse. Then there’s the sub-plot concerning Aurelia’s clever caricatures that goes nowhere. But what rescues the book is Sophie Jordan’s ability to create the most incredible, scorching sexual tension between her protagonists, and that aspect of the central relationship is hot enough to blister paint.

The problem with the audiobook, however, is that that element – which is a huge part of the story – is largely noticeable by its absence. I’ve listened to Carmen Rose (aka Heather Wilds) quite a lot, and while I, like some of my fellow AudioGals, have noticed her tendency to snatch breaths in odd places and give phrases and sentences strange inflections, I have enjoyed her performances for the most part. She has a lovely speaking voice in the contralto range, and doesn’t need to strain to portray the male characters convincingly. She manages several decent regional accents (although her Scottish one is still a little dodgy) and the technical aspects of her performance are good. One of the things she does well is to perform love scenes in a way which stops short of the full-on Meg Ryan, but which nonetheless conveys a good degree of heat between the hero and heroine. But that isn’t the case here. In the first big love scene late in the book, when Max and Aurelia are about to get it on on top of a desk, there is no sense of urgency to the characters’ voices. For two people who have professed to despise each other for years, there has to be something overwhelming happening between them for them to even be contemplating such a thing – and yet when Aurelia tells Max that she wants “what you give every other women”, she says it like she doesn’t care whether she gets it or not!

There’s an emotional detachment in the love scenes and throughout the whole audiobook that saddened me, because in spite of my reservations about the storyline, I’d been looking forward to re-visiting the searing chemistry between Max and Aurelia that leapt off the page when I read the book. But the expected fireworks between this adversarial couple amounted to no more than a couple of damp squibs.

Caz

Narration: C

Book Content: B-

Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in

Violence Rating: Minimal

Genre: Historical Romance

Publisher: Harper Audio [jwl-utmce-widget id=32435]