Narrated by Johanna Parker
I’ve had the print version of Worth the Fall on my TBR since it was first released after I saw a tweet from Shannon Stacey recommending it. Alas, I have been defeated by the TBR of Doom so when I saw the audiobook come up for review, I requested it.
Abbie Davis is a pregnant, widowed mother of four (that is, four in addition to the bun in the oven). Her parents died when she was very young and she grew up in a series of foster homes. Her husband wasn’t much of a husband; he was too devoted to his job and making money. He was also a serial cheater. At least he left Abbie (apparently) looked after financially but as far as anything else, well, Abbie has basically always been on her own. Her children, Annie, Jack, Gracie and Charlie, are good kids who have really never known the love of a father.
Abbie, six months pregnant, takes the children on a seaside holiday for a week while she still can. There, she meets Navy SEAL, Matt McKinney. Matt is one of seven children himself and his family is very loving and close. At 34, he’s looking around and seeing most of his family settled down with a partner and children and he’s feeling a bit lonely. He accompanied his cousin, Rob, on holiday to act as Rob’s wingman but once he meets Abbie and the children, he’s deeply smitten. So much so, that when Rob goes home, Matt stays.
Matt is wonderful with the children and they adore him. He is familiar with kids and not fazed by taking care of them, having had plenty of practice in his own family. He finds Abbie unbelievably sexy and, by the end of the week, Matt is thinking of ways to make an ongoing relationship work because he doesn’t want to lose the best thing that’s ever happened to him.
Abbie is very independent and tends to close herself off emotionally. Her life experience is that everyone leaves and she doesn’t like to open herself up to hurt. Matt lives on the other side of the country to Abbie and is away a lot in his role as a SEAL. He is also carrying a lot of guilt because his best friend and fellow SEAL, Tommy, died. Matt made a deathbed promise to Tommy that he wouldn’t quit – something he had been intending to do. Matt is now determined to keep his promise and stay with the SEAL team but he doesn’t see how he can do that AND be with Abbie and the children.
I mostly enjoyed the narration. Ms. Parker gave each of the children fairly distinct voices and I was dying of the cute most of the time they were speaking. Gracie, in particular, was adorable. Matt’s voice was a bit on the husky side rather than particularly deep but easily distinguishable. I didn’t have trouble identifying any of the cast. The emotion of the story and the sizzle of Abbie’s and Matt’s chemistry was definitely audible too.
My one complaint (if that’s the right word) is that Ms. Parker tends to add a certain… breathiness to the end of sentences, which was a tic I found a bit annoying. However, either it got better or the story won me over anyway because I was noticing it a lot less by the end of the book.
Worth the Fall was a sweet sexy romance and it worked well on audio. It sounds like a lot, to take on a woman and her five children, but Matt never batted an eyelash about it and the way it was presented in the book, it felt as natural as breathing. I thought the premise might be a bit difficult to pull off successfully and I found the ending a little drawn out but I was pretty much charmed by this one.
Kaetrin
Narration: B
Book Content: B
Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in
Violence: Minimal
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Publisher: Tantor Audio
Worth the Fall was provided to AudioGals by Tantor Audio for review.
You are not the first one who has said this book works despite…well, despite everything, so help me.
We have a woman who has no family–no support system.
Her husband was not attentive–other than impregnating her with frequency-.
Her husband was not a good father–yet she keep getting pregnant by him.
Are any of these addressed at any point? While she was popping children, did she know he cheated? Did she make any provisions for a potential divorce? Did she take any steps to be informed on the states of the family’s finances if such came to pass?
I have a problem when we are told that a woman is so independent yet she doesn’t think of her children beyond the baby/toddler/early childhood stage.
The 5 children is what turned me off this book. I can’t think anything positive about this woman’s decision to have so many kids and it makes me extremely unsympathetic to her.
I don’t have a problem with someone wanting 5 children, or no children. I thought it was a bit of a hard sell for a single guy to take on such a large ready-made family, but the book convinced me. YMMV of course. :)
I’m not sure all of those things are addressed in the book but my impression was that she was desperate to keep her family together, particularly not having had a family of her own. She is financially secure – it’s clear her husband left her comfortably off.
I’m not seeing the link between her not making enquiries about her financial status after a potential divorce equaling not thinking of her children beyond the toddler stage. She is a very good mother and the children seemed pretty healthy and happy to me. Sure they had a shitty dad but so do a lot of people. Maybe I missed something in your comment though?
The book doesn’t really go into their marriage all that much and I don’t know if there was a decision as such to have more children or whether it was more the absence of birth control. And if it was the latter, I don’t know why that was either but she was clearly happy to be having the 5th child and she could afford it so I didn’t see it as being irresponsible.
It’s personal baggage that as a reader I bring to the story. Sorry to have hit you with it.
I’m the youngest of five and things sucked for a very long time on several fronts, but the money issue was the most urgently pressing (as you may imagine), so I always struggle with stories involving so many children when the husband is uninvolved.
The entire time I’m reading, part of me is asking, “they don’t love each other, divorce is a very real possibility, being a single mother with a minivan full of kids and no family support system would suck (mostly for the kids), what measures is she taking to protect them when the inevitable fecal matter hits the aeration device?”
Obviously people can decide to have as many children as they want/can, but these are the questions that inevitably arise for me, and in fiction I would like to see at least some of them addressed. Which rarely to never happens–to my satisfaction at least.
I understand that. Some of your issues weren’t addressed but most of the reason the husband was uninvolved was because he was working all the time and focused on making loads of money. It’s clear (without being specific) that he was successful. The description of their house, that the children all have their own bedrooms, that Abbie never worries about finances during the entire book and the children go to a posh private school etc. all add up to that not being an issue. Even if they had divorced, I expect she’d have been awarded a fair whack of money and child support and alimony. For all the issues Abbie was dealing with, money wasn’t one of them and so it was easy for me to relax into the other aspects of the story. I honestly never had any thoughts about why she’d had so many children or anything like that – if she’d been poor and struggling then I may have, but as it was, it was a non-issue for me. Obviously YMMV :)