Disarm by June Gray

disarmNarrated by Emily Durante and Mikael Naramore

Disarm is a love letter to the family and friends of those that serve in our armed services. It not only explores loss and PTSD, but it dives into the effects of deployment and absence, and balances military career advancement against the need for PTSD treatment.

Elsie and Henry have been close since high school, when Henry became her brother Jason’s best friend, in their sophomore year. Henry has been protective of Elsie for years and that bond grew tighter after they both lost Jason to a sniper in Afghanistan. As platonic roommates in Oklahoma, they work through their grief and explore careers, hers in online graphic design and marketing and his in the military. Elsie and Henry fight a growing attraction until one night, after a dance becomes a close encounter, the fight is over and the passion begins. As they dive into almost frantic passion, Elsie finds out the most pressing of his many secrets: he has been deployed to Afghanistan for six months, and he leaves in two weeks.

Elsie begins to realize that hiding secrets, with the rationale of protecting her, is a common Henry trait. While they both suffer through the deployment, Elsie relives her brother’s death, but begins learning to survive alone through fear and doubt. When he returns, a changed man with anger issues and PTSD, Elsie’s doubts increase, even as she urges him to get help. What follows is the evolution of two people where love battles with fear; Elsie and Henry learn what it means to be true to themselves, before they can whole-heartedly commit their heart to someone else.

In the prologue, the author explains that this is a personal story to her, as she has been a military wife. There are details in the book that I wish had been more developed; the fact that someone with PTSD has to take a delay in his/her career when they ask for and receive help is an issue that is skipped over, when Henry gets help outside of military healthcare, from a childhood therapist. I would have liked to have seen the couple try to fight through “the system”. Henry had a rough, isolating childhood, combined with the loss of Jason plus the PTSD, and he was obviously struggling. A couple of character development points bothered me. Elsie seemed surprised and unprepared for many aspects of Henry’s suffering, even though she lived through parts of his childhood, came from a military family and lost a brother to combat. She was alternately, oddly accepting or forgiving of some behaviors I thought she would have questioned, and judgmental where I would have expected sympathy. At some points my irritation with these odd reactions tempted me to stop listening, but the author made me personally invested in the characters and the plot, and I wanted to see what happened next.

Emily Durante captures the young and tortured voice of Elsie, and accurately depicts her emotional downs – anger, fear, doubt, grief (which is good, because Elsie is constantly going through those emotions), but she leaned toward a whine a little too often. I found her voice to be somewhat less believable in the throes of passion or in the rare times when she was euphoric. And her voice of Henry never sounded like a man; it always seemed to sound as if it were a girl with a cold.

There are two narrators listed, but Mikael Naramore doesn’t enter until the middle of the story. He has a tough job; the story has flashbacks and what you are supposed to hear is Henry at different ages. He is supposed to sound like a young guy at different ages – I would imagine beginning in high school or college – who has a chip on his shoulder and is emotionally immature. Naramore veers far into defiant arrogance and almost unlikeable – I had to keep telling myself that this was the point.

Overall, I found the book filled with a little too much extreme and grating emotion; it was tough for me to determine if that was the narration or the writing.

Victoria


Narration: C

Book Content: B-

Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in

Violence: Fighting

Genre: Contemporary Romance

Publisher: Brilliance Audio

 

Disarm was provided to AudioGals by Brilliance Audio for review.

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