Narrated by Andi Arndt and Jeremy York
Mackenzie Locke is a love-aholic – she just wants men to love her and marry her, so she’s been engaged three times. Problem is, she’s also been jilted three times, so she takes herself and her two BFFs to Love Rehab – a week at an Oklahoma ranch where a counselor, a shaman and a horse help the women find themselves, that is, their romantic/relationship selves.
Blake McKenna is the counselor’s brother, and he is also looking for some inner truths as he tries to decide whether to leave Oklahoma and his family to follow his passion in big East Coast city Boston, or stay near the comfort of family and friends in a less-than-exciting job. Then Blake and Mackenzie find each other as a one-night-stand, never to be repeated, on the night before the Love Rehab adventure begins, after which they have to look at each other the next morning, realizing they are going to be seeing a lot more of each other, and learn a lot more about each other, than they bargained for. After spending the week together (Blake as his sister’s helper, actually, not as a Love Rehab participant) without letting anyone else know that they had the one-night-stand, and also after they somehow manage to continue the stand to nights two, three and four and… also without anyone guessing – they each realize they’ve developed deeper feelings but neither one learned the true lesson of love: verbal communication.
Love Unexpected had a lot of potential – partially for a little more humor than was actually evident in the writing. Come on, three city gals go on vacay to a ranch in the middle of nowhere to learn about love? Think of the movie City Slickers, except with young women and no one dies*. And there’s a shaman and a horse, each of whom has some truths to expose about the women’s love lives. The familiar trope of the one-night-stand partner suddenly being someone you have to deal with works well enough, although you’d think Blake could have discerned that city slickers in the local bar were probably staying at his sister’s ranch.
I found myself rooting for Mackenzie, a doormat-turned-warrior, waiting for her to find herself and overcome her mother’s pattern of looking for love in all the wrong places. (Yeah, there should have been some more country music in this book too.) When the shaman implies that Mackenzie’s true love is someone she already knows, she assumes he means she will get back together with her most recent ex-fiance, Phil, but now that she’s discovered that she has been changing herself for each boyfriend, she decides she needs a fresh start. She feels that she learned the most from her clandestine relationship with Blake, which taught her to ask for what she wants, and she makes a plan to start doing that as soon as she gets back to her home town, which – wait for it – happens to be Boston. This is not a spoiler; it’s mentioned at the beginning. Getting back to the story – it was ok, and the setting was unique (to me), but I kept holding out for something wacky which never happened. Unfortunately, this left me with a feeling that the story was over-dramatic, which I thought could have been mitigated with a little levity.
Speaking of over-dramatic, Jeremy York is new to me. He was pretty good – good pacing, natural sound; his female voices were done ok, not great but generally not pitched in head voice; there weren’t many other men in the story since it focused on Mackenzie, her girlfriends and Blake’s sister, so I didn’t have much exposure to his ability to differentiate between male characters. His reading delivery has a feeling of urgency, a touch of breathlessness, which amped up during the graphically-described sex scenes (vanilla sex, but still), and this sounded a touch over-dramatic to me. Maybe there was more humor in the writing and the delivery killed it? I’m mostly ambivalent about his grade, because he did an ok job but it didn’t quite go all the way for me. Of course, Andi Arndt can do these twenty-something heroines in her sleep, which is not to imply at all that she sleep-walked through this performance. She was able to capture Mackenzie’s insecurities, of which there were a boatload. I’ve always found Arndt’s delivery to be well done, with natural pacing and no production issues like loud breathing or anything. She did the narrative straight, not overly dramatic, but again I just kept waiting for the punchline, and never did hear it. I don’t want to say it was at all angsty, but I expected a couple of LOL moments, given the setting and situation. The closest I got was my lips tilting up slightly on one side, once or twice.
I’m on the fence for recommendations – it was ok, not bad, and you can currently get it as Whispersync for about $7.50, not a great bargain but less than 1 credit at Audible.com. I genuinely enjoyed Bay’s King of Wall Street, but DNFed Indigo Nights, so right now her audios are about a C average for me, although it’s a 4.5 star rating at Audible.
*Ok, “no one dies” might have been a movie spoiler, but if you haven’t already seen City Slickers, you probably aren’t going to watch it anyway, although it was a funny movie starring Billy Crystal back in 1991.
Melinda
Narration: Andi Arndt B+ and Jeremy York B-
Book Content: C+
Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in
Violence Rating: None
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Publisher: Louise Bay
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