Taming Blaze by Sabrina Page 

Taming BlazeNarrated by Arika Rapson and Nelson Hobbs

I love MC romances. I know, I know, they tend to de-value women or are filled with misogynist and anachronous men, blah, blah, blah. I don’t care, I LOVE THEM and have done so since reading Kristen Ashley’s Motorcycle Man. There’s something about a man who rides a motorcycle and lives outside the law but still has a moral code that makes me wild! So when Taming Blaze came up for review, I saw the words “motorcycle club” in the series title and immediately asked for it.

Dani Arias has a life most people would envy – fancy clothes, expensive cars, trips to anywhere in the world. What no one sees is the cost of that life to Dani. Her father is Guillermo Arias, notorious drug-runner and smuggler. With a father like hers, it makes it difficult to trust people and to form lasting relationships. So Dani lives in the moment, taking what pleasure from life she can, with whomever she wants.

On the run from the results of one of these “encounters”, Dani receives a call from her father. She needs to come home; the men who murdered her mother are now after her. On the way, she has a meltdown and pulls over on the side of the road. There, she encounters Blaze, a dark and rough looking biker dude who puts Dani on her guard. Despite his rough exterior, however, he’s nice and offers her a lift to a nearby restaurant to call for help. Talking to Blaze, Dani is briefly able to forget the drama of the last twenty-four hours and be normal for a change. Blaze has a past similar to Dani. He’s as broken on the inside as she is and the two of them have more in common than Dani ever expected. They connect and turn that bond into a passionate encounter but Dani knows that she will probably never see Blaze again. It’s for the best because her father would never let her be with a man like Blaze. Of course, discovering Blaze is her father’s employee changes everything.

My first thought upon finishing Taming Blaze was “Thank God, I’m finally done!” If that doesn’t tell you how I felt about this book, maybe my second thought of “what a hot mess this book was” offers a better idea. I did not like this book. In fact, if I hadn’t agreed to review it, it would have been a DNF at Chapter Five. Why? Because that’s when I lost any respect or interest towards the main characters. The opening chapter has Dani tied up to the bed while the guy she is having sex is choking her. She is clearly afraid for her life and is begging for him to stop and he keeps doing so, to the point Dani thinks she’s dying. The scene, described in such a manner that there is a trigger warning on the blurb, leaves horrible bruising and causes Dani to run away while the man is passed out. Okay, this isn’t too bad. I don’t like these types of scenes but I can get past them. However, in Chapter Five – literally the next day – Dani is on the side of the road with the strange biker who stopped to help her, being banged to within an inch of her life. SHE HAS SEX WITH A STRANGER LESS THAN TWELVE HOURS AFTER NEARLY BEING CHOKED TO DEATH DURING SEX WITH ANOTHER MAN! I’m sorry, that doesn’t fly for me. A girl can do whomever she wants, whenever she wants, but I find it hard to believe that a woman would put herself in a position so similar to one that had nearly killed her and so soon after. So my interest in the book was nil after that point.

There were other issues overshadowed by my feelings about the main characters but most of these centered around a few plot inconsistencies. An example of the plot issues – Dani mentions she’s been around a few bikers, enough so she can identify the emblems on Blaze’s cut and what all that they mean at first sight but she doesn’t know that the members’ meetings are called church. Or when Benecio was explaining how he had found Blaze and Dani – he mentioned a contractor being bribed but never mentions who led him to the contractor in the first place. Supposedly even Blaze’s brothers didn’t know he had the cabin so who would have put Benecio in the path of said contractor?

One other thing especially bothered me. Blaze’s real name was never mentioned. Not just his birth name, but his last name as well. In fact, I can’t remember any of the MC guys’ full names being mentioned. We learned Dani’s full name, as well as those of her father, her uncle, her mother; heck, even the jerk that nearly killed her in the beginning but not Blaze or his brothers. It made it really hard for me to take his and Dani’s relationship serious. I kept seeing the end of the movie Speed rolling through my mind where Bullock tells Reaves that relationships built during intense moments hardly ever work (although I do want it noted their characters knew one another’s names before they jumped into a relationship!). It just seemed weird to me.

As for the narration, it too was a disappointment. Usually, if the narrators are good enough, they can make up for an unsatisfactory book. That wasn’t the case here. There were issues with both narrator’s performances that didn’t help the story along in any way.

Arika Rapson, a name I’ve heard but have yet to enjoy, wasn’t terrible. There were no problems with background noises or audible inhalations and her performance of Dani was decent. Her choice for Blaze’s character, however, was not so great. He sounded like a stereotypical high school student in one of those old school educational films. I don’t think her choice matched the character created by the author. It screamed cocky and full of himself but the tone of the book had him a little unsure of himself and reserved. She gives Dani’s father and uncle a lightly accented tone but not enough that I could tell what country they were from. If the author hadn’t indicated Panama, I would have never known. Even worse was the fact when these two men were arguing, I couldn’t tell one from the other. She occasionally slurred her speech, so some words sounded entirely different than they were supposed to. “Bedroom” became “bedrum”. “Chomping” sounded like “shomping”. It happened enough times that I was never sure if it was an affectation she chose for the character or her natural way of speaking.

Nelson Hobbs was a name unfamiliar to me. Audible has him at over twenty titles, mostly contemporary or New Adult. His performance, like Rapson’s, wasn’t that bad; I didn’t take issues with his choices for the characters. His performance of Blaze hit the right balance between sensitive and assured and he did an even better job with Guillermo and Benecio’s characters. I don’t know if he performed an authentic Panamanian accent, but his performance sounded Latin American-ish without being overly dramatized. However, while he did slur a few words like Rapson, his mistakes came from mispronunciations. Whenever he said “Dani” it sounded like “Denny”. There was also a part towards the end (5:00:54 according to my iPhone) where he stuttered a phrase. At first, I thought it was a part of the book but when I looked up the passage on my Kindle, there was no dashes or breaks in the sentence to indicate hesitation.

Taming Blaze – and its narrators – and I were not a good fit. I went in expecting a motorcycle club romance and got a mafia Romeo & Juliet tale instead. Although it is the Book 1 in the Inferno Motorcycle Club series, it’s unlikely that I will listen to or read any more in this series. As for the narrators, I’m undecided if I will try them again, either alone or together. They weren’t terrible performers; I’ve listened to worse but there wasn’t anything that stood out positively about their performance. If I do listen to either again, it will probably be with a title I’d not read before so I won’t go in with expectations.

Diana


Narration:  Arika Rapson C- and Nelson Hobbs C-

Book Content:  D

Steam Factor:  For your burning ears only

Violence:  Domestic violence

Genre:  Contemporary Romance

Publisher:  Tantor Audio

 

Taming Blaze was provided to AudioGals by Tantor Audio for review.

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