Narrated by Mary Robinette Kowal
I liked the blurb of Life After Perfect when I read it. I hoped for a book similar to Robyn Carr’s Virgin River. There were some similarities in the set up; a woman moves to a small town to change her life, meets a local guy, they fall in love, HEA. There are some differences too – this local guy is a doctor, whose wife died of cancer two years earlier, and the heroine isn’t a widow – she’s a wife who’s been cheated on. Robyn Carr books have tended to become too women’s fiction-y for my liking, with more focus on other characters or the heroine’s personal growth than the romance. But I loved Virgin River and I was really hoping that Life After Perfect would give me that same happy buzz. Unfortunately, there was nowhere near enough romance and it, too, was way too women’s fiction-y for my liking.
By the halfway point in the book, our heroine, Katy, is only two days away from finding out her husband was a cheater. She is in no way ready for a new relationship. Dr. Derek Hanson was still in deep mourning for his wife and was in no way ready to move on. Nevertheless, when Derek lays eyes on Katy, he suddenly discovers a renewed interest in the opposite sex. Frankly, there wasn’t enough in the book for me to understand what it was about Katy that ‘woke him up’. Remember, this is when we are already halfway through the story. I listened to way more about Katy’s married life and Katy’s cheating husband and her friends from home than I was interested in. I was thinking, when’s the romance going to start?
I’m all about the HEA. I want to read about the heroine and hero falling in love and living happily ever after. I’m really not much interested in the other stuff. It gets in the way of the romance. The ebook is published by Montlake Romance. I thought that was a clue. I was wrong.
The whole book takes place in five weeks. The first week is completed in the first chapter and the last chapter skips forward two weeks. So; the main action of the book is all within a fortnight. The protagonists don’t even meet until the second week of that fortnight; there was just not enough courtship and romance in this book to satisfy me.
When Katy got mad at Derek because he didn’t tell her he was also (and mainly) a doctor, not just a fireman with the Boot Creek Volunteer Firefighters Association, I got stabby. She was questioning his honesty and she HADN’T TOLD HIM SHE WAS STILL MARRIED and had only split up with her husband TWO DAYS before!! After that, through all their interactions, it was the elephant in the room for me. She took far too long to tell him, which made no sense given her strong feelings about adultery.
There was also a subplot involving a woman with end stage cancer. While it tugged my heartstrings and choked me up at times, I couldn’t help but feel it was mainly there to be inspiration porn to complement the “big city consumer materialism is bad, small town loyalty and home cooking is good” message of the narrative.
The story ends in a hopeful nearly HFN which tries hard to be a HEA but I didn’t believe it. I really wouldn’t call Life After Perfect a romance. (I found out today that Amazon has a category: Women’s Divorce Fiction. What has been seen cannot be unseen.)
The narration, unfortunately, wasn’t enough to hold my interest. I know Mary Robinette Kowal is a Science Fiction/Fantasy writer. I hadn’t realised she was also a narrator. She was certainly able to convey the emotions of the story but I actively disliked her male character voices. The depiction of Derek was the best of the lot, but I still didn’t like it. (I allow it did improve over the course of the book – either that or I got used to it.) There were others which were more like caricatures than characters. “Old Man Johnson” sounded ridiculous. I can buy a narrator lowering her pitch only slightly and I can pretend it’s a male voice. (I do the same in reverse for male narrators all the time). But I found Ms. Kowal’s performance of the men to be unbelievable on any level. They just didn’t sound like real people to me and it was very difficult for me to think of Derek as romantic hero. I am eternally grateful Old Man Johnson didn’t have a secondary romance because that would have been the very last straw.
Ms. Kowal’s character voice for Katy was sickly sweet and very girlish and it didn’t fit well with the text, which portrayed her as a professional woman of thirty.
This was a narration I struggled with of a book which alternately bored and annoyed me. There were pockets of emotional resonance and it was well enough written; I just didn’t like the story. Maybe if it had begun a few months after Katy had left her husband I’d have had a better shot, but as it was, it was too soon for me to believe any kind of romance between Katy and Derek and the extraneous parts of the book didn’t really hold my interest.
Perhaps I’d have fared better with the narration if the story had won me over but as it is, I can’t see myself seeking out either the author or narrator again.
Kaetrin
Narration: C-
Book Content: C-
Steam Factor: You can play it out loud (non-explicit sex scenes)
Violence: Minimal (if you don’t count me being stabby)
Genre: Women’s Fiction
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Life After Perfect was provided to AudioGals by Brilliance Audio for a review.
Women’s Divorce Fiction? That’s really a thing? Um, I have no words.
I know, right? I was LOL!
I’m with you two!