Escorted by Claire Kent

escortedNarrated by Simone Lewis

I’ve had Escorted in eBook format on my TBR (of Doom) for a while now but haven’t managed to get to it, even though it was highly recommended. I loved Cara McKenna’s Curio, which had a similar set up, so I thought I’d like this one too. Unfortunately this story didn’t work very well for me and it is difficult to tell how much of that was the content and how much was a fairly lacklustre narration.

Lori Addison is a (very) successful romance author but at 26, she’s still a virgin. It’s not that she has any objection to sex, but for various reasons, it hasn’t happened for her. Now, her embarrassment over her inexperience is a barrier to dating so she’s decided to do something about it and hire an escort to rid her of her pesky hymen.

Ander Lourdes (first name real, last name not) is a successful male escort who works exclusively via personal referrals. I gather he’s not cheap, but the actual dollar amounts are never mentioned. Basically, the story goes that they meet, have a lot of sex, talk, get to know each other a bit* and fall in love each without the other knowing it, then other stuff happens which I won’t spoil and then: HEA.

I put an asterisk at “get to know each other a bit” because not a lot of the getting to know each other is on the page. There is a lot of sex. A. Lot. But Ander is very reserved about himself and doesn’t talk about his daily life. They talk about art and books and general topics. For much of the book, her penname is kept from him so their interactions are both very surface and very intimate but there’s not a lot of the in between – and the in between is something I do like to see on the page (or hear in my ears).

At first, of course, the sex was very transactional. But I didn’t really feel a shift from that to something more. It always felt kind of clinical and boring to me. Some of that (maybe even more than some) was down to the narration. Simone Lewis has a very pleasant voice to listen to; she doesn’t trip over her words and the production was clean. But there was little passion in her performance. When, as she often did (because she often had cause to), Lori said “I’m coming”, Ms. Lewis sounded disinterested and kind of flat. It wasn’t breathy or urgent or choked or excited or anything. It was dull as dishwater. This guy is supposed to be sex on legs but his goodness was all told not shown – and I mean that in the narration sense. I needed Ms. Lewis to put more oomph into showing me that Ander was super good in the sack. Because the way she said it? I didn’t believe it.

It’s not that she was unable to deliver emotion: there were some scenes when emotion and passion were present (albeit, even then a little underdone) but in the sex scenes, where I expected more emotion and passion, there was basically none.

There was also very little differentiation between Ander’s and Lori’s voices. Ander’s was slightly more stern but during conversation, any subtle differences were quickly lost and it became difficult to work out who was talking.

The book is entirely from Lori’s perspective and I never really got a handle on Ander. There were things he did which perplexed Lori but were never explained once they started talking more freely in the later parts of the book. (For instance, he asked her, a few times, whether she had climaxed. This was something that was blindingly obvious but he was asking her. Why? It is still a mystery).

I know at least part of my unlove of the story was the text. Because I wasn’t really into it and couldn’t wait for it to end, I suppose I started noticing things I may not have cared about as much in other circumstances. But when Ms. Lewis uttered: “Her heart beating as wildly as the feelings in her heart”, I rolled my eyes HARD. Because I have the book, I checked to see whether this was a narration fail or an editing fail. It was editing. *cries*

Ultimately, Escorted just wasn’t very romantic to me. I didn’t have enough of Ander to really understand his reaction to Lori and most of their relationship felt transactional and clinical. I knew there was a lot of angst in Ander’s background but I never really felt it. The language used in the book, combined with a snoozefest narration left me flat and distanced from the characters. This book gets a lot of love from my reading friends however, so maybe I’m an outlier.

[section label=’Audiobook Information’ anchor=’Audiobook Information’]

Kaetrin


AUDIOBOOK INFORMATION

TITLE: Escorted

AUTHOR: Claire Kent

NARRATED BY: Simone Lewis

GENRE: Contemporary Romance

STEAM FACTOR: Glad I had my earbuds in

REVIEWER: Kaetrin [button type=’link’ link=’http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00UTVN674/?tag=audiogalsnet-20′ size=’btn-lg’ variation=’btn-default’ target=’blank’]Buy Escorted by Claire Kent on Amazon[/button]

2 thoughts on “Escorted by Claire Kent

  1. This has been on my TBR helf for some time now. I think I’ll take it off now. Thanks for the review. It helped me make up my mind.

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