Best Kind of Broken by Chelsea Fine

Narrated by Susanna Duff

I’ve had my eye on Best Kind of Broken for a while and as my TBL is a lot shorter than my TBR (aka the TBR of Doom), audio seemed like the best option. I really enjoyed Susanna Duff’s narration so I’m more than happy with my choice.

Sarah “Pixie” Marshall is 19 years old and at the end of her freshman year at college. She needs both a place to live and a job, as her university doesn’t allow students to remain in the dorms over summer break. She takes a job as a kitchen hand (which includes room and board) at Willow Inn, run by her Aunt Ellen.

What she hadn’t planned on was encountering Levi Andrews at the same place. Not only is he the inn’s resident handyman, they are the only boarders in the to-be-renovated East wing and are obliged to share a bathroom.

Pixie and Levi have a long and complicated history which is revealed slowly throughout the book. I admit to feeling a level of frustration with the time it took to get to the event which made everything go pear-shaped. To avoid spoilers however, I’ll just say that Pixie and Levi spent a lot of time together as children and an accident changed their lives forever.

Until she encounters him at the Inn, Pixie has not seen nor spoken to Levi in months. Both of them are hurting and grieving and weighed down with guilt for what happened – they each believe themselves to be to blame and this causes a complete breakdown in their communication.

The story is told in alternating first person POV, so the listener knows more about what is motivating Levi and Pixie – including the real reason Levi uses all the hot water in the mornings so Pixie is forced to have a cold shower every day.

In some ways the story is a little… juvenile. The sniping Levi and Pixie do is reminiscent of a little boy pulling a girl’s pigtails and similar elementary school antics. Sometimes it made me roll my eyes (and feel old) but what made the story for me was the author’s sense of humour, on display through the course of the book. There were moments I was chuckling at the funny things Pixie and Levi said or thought – mostly self-deprecating. Added to that, Levi’s friend Zach (and Marvin the Goat – yes, you read that right) was hilarious. I am very much looking forward to a story about Zach.

It’s clear that Aunt Ellen has hopes that proximity will lead to a rapprochement between the pair and of course this inevitably occurs – it wouldn’t be a romance otherwise. It is also the story of two people coming to grips with crushing grief and their relationship parallels this as the novel progresses.

Susanna Duff did a great job with the narration. She delivered the humour with excellent timing. I can’t help but think she had a lot of fun with Zach too actually. (Seriously, there’s a GOAT). There is a youthfulness to the story, even when the characters are acting with more maturity than deliberately blowing fuses to cause power outages or using all the hot water, which she also captures. I could accept some of the behaviours because they were so young. For the most part, they acted their age and they always sounded their age.

Ms. Duff gives Levi a believably husky, slightly deeper voice than that of Pixie and there was, to my ear, a difference in how she delivered the narrative depending on whose POV I was hearing. The other characters were well differentiated and I had no trouble identifying who was speaking. One of the best things about listening to a romance audio is hearing the banter between the characters and that was wonderfully on display here. The sexual tension between Levi and Pixie was palpable.

While I thought parts of the story were a little drawn out and occasionally simplistic, overall it felt believable and it certainly entertained me. I’m happy to recommend Best Kind of Broken to fans of New Adult romance.

Kaetrin

Narration: B

Book Content: B

Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in

Violence: Minimal

Genre: New Adult Romance

Publisher: Hachette Audio

Best Kind of Broken was provided to AudioGals by Hachette Audio for a review.