Seduced by Molly O’Keefe

SeducedNarrated by Cam Drynan

I didn’t really know what to expect when I started listening to Seduced. Some of my friends had recommended this (and its companion book Tempted) to me, and the narrator, Cam Drynan, sounded okay in the short sample available at Audible. I thought I’d give it a go.

Seduced is a western historical, set a couple of years after the American Civil War. Melody Hurst used to be a Scarlett O’Hara type, except possibly less enterprising. She was a pampered and privileged Southern belle. She manipulated herself into an engagement, mainly for status and pride rather than love or affection. She lived an easy life of leisure. Then the war came and stripped her of her rose-coloured glasses just as it stripped her of her home, her family (apart from her sister, Annie) and her future. She learned about hard work and grief and pain. Melody left her childish and stuck-up ways behind during and after the war because she had to. I’m sure she was a much nicer person because of it but the cost was very great.

Melody marries Jimmy Hurst after the war. He was the younger brother of her fiancé and the only one who returned. She hoped he would help her and Annie save their home but he was lazy and shiftless, as well as being violent with her. Jimmy wants everything handed to him; he doesn’t like to work for anything. He even deserted from the Confederate Army. After selling Melody’s beloved home to a “carpetbagger”, Jimmy drags Melody and Annie all over the country in the search of a quick buck.

The book begins when Jimmy is forcing Melody to see if the owner of the cabin they are about to take over is home. Jimmy has a grudge against the owner, Stephen Baywood, and intends to kill him and take possession of his land, which appears to be rich in rock oil. Stephen is out when they arrive but when he returns later, Jimmy shoots him (this all happens in the first few pages so it is not a spoiler). Jimmy then heads to Denver to find himself a prospector who can teach him what he needs to know about rock oil. The women are instructed to let Stephen die.

Although terrified, they try their best to save Stephen’s life and hide him in a cave nearby so that Jimmy won’t know. If Jimmy were to discover Stephen was alive (even if comatose) he would take it out on Melody and Annie in extremely violent ways. Jimmy has threatened, more than once, to kill Annie in order to punish Melody.

When Jimmy returns, he has a dark-eyed stranger with him who identifies himself as “Cole Smith”. Cole told Jimmy he was a prospector but he has been tracking Jimmy as they both search for Stephen Baywood. Stephen is Cole’s long lost brother. If, as he suspects, Jimmy has killed Stephen, Jimmy will pay with his life.

The blurb says that Melody Hurst is a widow so it’s not a surprise that Jimmy ends up dead pretty quickly.

After that, Melody and her sister Annie must decide what to do. Stephen is still recovering and Cole offers to pay the women to stay for a while and nurse his brother. This will give the women some money with which to set themselves up, perhaps in Denver or elsewhere.

Melody loves Colorado. She loves the cabin and the meadows with flowers and the nearby spring. She loves the peace and beauty of her surroundings and she does not want to leave. Annie, however, is keen to go to Denver and hopefully pursue a nursing role with the local doctor.

Cole is broken from the war too. One of the most poignant scenes in the book is when he describes all the things he has lost as a result of the fighting – even though he fought for the Union, it does not feel like a victory. During the war and since it ended he has done too much killing and it takes the possibility of growing something new in Colorado and the promise of a future with Melody for him to begin to forgive himself.

This all sounds like it should be a heart-wrenching story, doesn’t it? But my heart wasn’t wrenched much at all and I mostly felt disconnected from the emotion of the book. I think in large part this falls to the narration which was no better than serviceable. While Mr. Drynan was able to render female characters without resorting to caricature or annoying falsetto, he didn’t really add anything to the characterisation either. My impression was that he was so focused on being precise in his language – there was something almost staccato about the way he spaced out the words to ensure each one could be heard clearly – that he missed any subtext or emotional nuance altogether.

While there was differentiation between the male and female characters, those of the same gender sounded very much alike (except for Jimmy who did sound snide and awful – although his part was relatively small, he seemed to have the most characterisation of all in the narration; something I thought was very odd indeed).

There is a lot of set up in the book. When it starts, Melody is (very unhappily) married to someone else. Cole doesn’t arrive until Chapter three. The romance didn’t really commence until Chapter 10 and things didn’t heat up until much later than that. In fact, I was very surprised when I checked my iPod and saw I had only one Chapter left to listen to as things were only just getting started!

I got a bit of whiplash at the end because there had not been enough courtship and romance for me to buy the HEA.

It may be that if I had read the book, I may have appreciated the language more or seen romantic subtext in the interactions between Cole and Melody earlier on. But I listened and the narration was so pedestrian as to make the story kind of boring and underwhelming. I don’t think it was all the fault of the narration however. The fact is, two thirds of the book had passed before there was any sniff of romance and that’s not enough for me.

Kaetrin


Narration: C

Book Content: C

Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in

Violence Rating: Fighting, Domestic Violence

Genre: Historical/Western Romance

Publisher: Molly O'Keefe

Seduced was provided to AudioGals for a review.

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