The Rogue You Know by Shana Galen

The Rogue You KnowNarrated by Beverley A. Crick

The Rogue You Know is the second book in Shana Galen’s Covent Garden Cubs series, and, like its predecessor, Earls Just Want to Have Fun, is an enjoyable, fast-paced and often humourous story featuring an improbable but well-written cross-class romance between a pair of engaging and attractive protagonists.

Lady Susanna Derring is twenty years old, but her mother, the Dowager Countess of Dane, refuses to cut the apron strings, keeping such a strict eye on her daughter that Susanna is feeling increasingly suffocated. It’s only when, at a gathering of ladies of her mother’s acquaintance, Susanna manages to break free for a few moments and is engaged in conversation by one of the other guests, that she begins to suspect that perhaps there may be more to the countess’ over-protectiveness than meets the eye. The woman hints that Susanna’s mother may not always have been the uptight model of propriety she is now, and her passing reference to Vauxhall Gardens makes Susanna determined to go there to see if she can find out anything about her mother’s past.

Listeners to the previous book will recall meeting Gideon Harrow, a friend of its heroine and also a member of the Covent Garden Cubs, one of several criminal gangs operating in the Seven Dials area of London. Gideon is a decent chap, despite his larcenous activities, having helped Marlowe to escape the clutches of the evil gang-leader, and now, he has agreed to pull one last job in order to make enough money to be able to leave London and make a new life for himself elsewhere.

Unfortunately for him, things don’t go according to plan and he ends up on the run and needing to find somewhere to stash the loot while he lies low for a while. He quickly decides that there is no way he will be able to hide in the Rookeries from someone who knows them every bit as he does, and so he heads for Mayfair, intending to ask Marlowe – now the Countess of Dane – for help. But things go from bad to worse when, on entering Derring House, he is hit over the head by a familiar-looking young woman brandishing a candlestick, who proceeds to relieve him of his cargo and tells him he’ll get it back after he’s escorted her to Vauxhall.

Stunned – literally – and frustrated, Gideon has no choice but to agree to Susanna’s demands if he wants to stand a chance of living long enough to get out of London.

Susanna is exhilarated. For the first time in her life, she is free and doing something she wants rather than having to constantly do as she is told. But it’s not long before trouble catches up with them, and what Susanna had thought of as a simple adventure takes a wrong turn. Together, she and Gideon race through some of the darkest, most hazardous areas of London, bouncing from one dangerous situation to another, while all the time finding out things about themselves and each other they have never had the chance to discover before.

The story moves quickly, but even though the romance between the lady and the thief develops over a little more than twenty-four hours, it doesn’t feel rushed. The sparks fly between Gideon and Susanna right from the start, and their interactions are frequently funny and sometimes quite poignant. I admit that I did find Susanna a little annoying to start with, because her obsession with getting to Vauxhall (what she expected to find there, I really have no idea!) is so consuming that it, together with her extreme naïveté, causes her to make some ill-advised decisions which seriously compromise her and Gideon’s safety. As the story progresses, however, she discovers an inner strength which enables her to do things she’d never thought herself capable of and learns to assert her independence.

Gideon is an attractive hero, a “diamond in the rough”, who has been dealt a tough hand in life and has learned to make the best of it. He’s done things he’s not proud of in order to survive, but the time he spends with Susanna serves to show him that perhaps he’s not quite the conscienceless rogue he has long believed himself to be. The romance is certainly an implausible one, but Ms Galen pulls it off admirably, showing how both Gideon and Susanna have been trapped by their upbringing and self-perception. She also doesn’t sugar-coat the conditions in which the poorest citizens of London lived, bringing to life the sounds, sights and smells of the squalid hovels, pubs and gin-shops they frequented.

I’ve listened to Beverley A. Crick only once before, in Kate Noble’s The Game and the Governess, which I reviewed at All About Romance. I enjoyed her performance in that audiobook for the most part and likened her style of delivery to that of Carolyn Morris, particularly when it came to her ability to highlight the humour in the story and her manner of differentiating characters principally through tone and accent rather than pitch. Ms Crick’s performance in The Rogue You Know is an equally entertaining and skilful one; she’s an accomplished vocal actress and here she is given the chance to showcase that ability by performing a wide variety of “character” roles, from the various, cockney-accented members of the criminal gangs of St. Giles to the haughty tones of the dowager countess. Her interpretation of Susanna is an excellent fit, expertly conveying an impression of wide-eyed innocence through her voice alone. The narrative is performed at a good pace and with a lot of expression; Ms Crick is a narrator who acts and pays a lot of attention to detail, injecting a laugh or tears into her speech when called for. (Fortunately she’s not a “he laughed. Ha, ha.” type of narrator!)

If you’re someone who likes an audiobook to be a 100 % accurate reflection of the printed word, then you might have a problem with her portrayal of Gideon, as Ms Crick has – I think rightly – opted to give him a not-quite-cockney accent. His speech, written down, is written correctly; by which I mean he says “think” or “thought” rather than “fink” or “fought”. Some authors – particularly those who write books set in Scotland – often try to write phonetically, with lots of “dinna”s and “aye”s, which can cause headaches for the reader. Ms Galen doesn’t go in for a cockney version of this, which probably makes for an easier reading experience, but the narrator has opted to perform Gideon’s dialogue in in a way which feels right for a character who has not had the benefit of a gentleman’s education or elocution lessons. While I agree with her acting choice here, there is something about her interpretation of Gideon overall that doesn’t quite work for me. That’s not to say it’s horrible because it isn’t. But in giving him the accent, she has somehow made him sound a little “bloated” (for want of a better description) and that takes something away from his overall attractiveness as a romantic hero.

But with that said, I still enjoyed her performance and would definitely rate it as being above average. The Rogue You Know is an enjoyable, light-hearted adventure romp that nonetheless manages to take a serious look at class difference and highlight some of society’s worst inequalities. It works well as an audiobook, even taking into account the reservations I’ve expressed, and I enjoyed Ms Crick’s performance well enough to want to listen to more of her work.

Caz


Narration: B

Book Content: B

Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in

Violence Rating: Minimal

Genre: Historical Romance

Publisher: Tantor Audio

The Rogue You Know was provided to AudioGals by Tantor Audio for a review.

 

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