The Proposal by Katie Ashley

Narrated by Justine O’Keef

Warning: spoilers for Book 1, The Proposition

At the end of The Proposition, Aidan has “self-sabotaged himself” (yes, that is a quote from the book) and Emma has walked in on him with another woman. He didn’t do the deed and had decided not to go through with it, but he had done enough to break Emma’s trust in him.

As a general rule, I do think there is a conflict when relationship advice is given by the douche-canoe’s sister but Emma, nevertheless, accepts Aidan’s sister, Becky’s, advice to “decide right now whether Aidan was worth fighting for.” Despite apparently deciding that she would in fact fight for Aidan, she er, doesn’t really.

Just for fun, in The Proposal, a love triangle aspect is brought into the picture (something which I could have done completely without – it did nothing for the story in any meaningful way except annoy me and continue what had become, basically a masturbatory fantasy of grovel and two men slavering over her.) when Dr. Pesh Nadeen sees Emma at a hospital visit (she is not his patient) and, despite the fact that she is six months pregnant, asks her out. They keep having this ridiculous conversation wherein she says she only wants to be friends but, oh my goodness, you’re so hot and I could really fall for you except I don’t know how I feel about Aidan and I’m not in a place to commit to another relationship but you’re so hot and he says okay and then puts the moves on her anyway. There is even a scene where Emma is pregnant with Aidan’s baby, living in his house, and going on romantic dates with Pesh and, while she feels a little guilty about it, she STILL DOES IT. Un. Believable.

There is also an extremely distasteful, sexist conversation between Kasey and Emma and later Emma and Aidan about how, now that he is showing his softer caring side to Emma, he has “grown a vag”. I’m not kidding.

(There may have been a bit of yelling at the iPod at this point *cough*).

Part of The Proposition could have been edited out. Most of The Proposal could have been cut (the last 3+ hours is nothing more than an extended saccharin epilogue which made my ears bleed). Provided you can get behind the premise, you could have had one entertaining and sexy story. But this reads like fan fiction to me, with storylines going on for no apparent reason and with characters back flipping all over the place. Seriously they could try out for the Olympics the way their positions kept changing about their feelings – sometimes in the same paragraph, even the same sentence.

And it’s just not cool to blame every single little thing on pregnancy hormones. It really isn’t. It’s not a “get out of jail free card” to be a selfish cow or any of the myriad other things it was used for in the story.

Again, the narration kept me going. Pesh’s character is of Indian descent and Ms. Keef did a wonderful job of putting in a slight accent without making him a caricature. His voice was a little deeper than Aidan’s and it had just a tinge of the Indian cadence. I think it was rendered perfectly. Emma’s and Kasey’s voices were still annoying fairly often but Aidan’s smooth tones helped balance that out.

There were a few vocal errors where the sentence hadn’t quite ended or there was hesitation over a word but nothing of any significance. Most of the errors were in the text and that is something the narrator is not responsible for.

Once again, let me reiterate, I think Ms Keef’s skills would shine brighter with better material but by the last few hours of The Proposal, I just wanted it to stop.

Kaetrin

Narration:  C

Book Content:  D

Steam Factor:  For your burning ears only

Violence:  None

Genre:  Contemporary Romance

Publisher:  Tantor Audio

The Proposal was provided to AudioGals for review by Tantor Audio.