Narration by Susan Duerden
As a romance junkie, I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that I had never listened to an Eloisa James romance until now. With dozens of published historical romances since 2000, and as a professor of creative writing with degrees from Harvard, Oxford and Yale to boot, it’s safe to say that Ms. James is a highly qualified, prolific historical romance writer. With this for a background, and after having taken one look at the blurb of her latest, Four Night’s with the Duke, I just knew it was time for my first Eloisa James audiobook.
Four Nights with the Duke proved to be a humorous, witty, historical romance with a suspense twist that kept me on my toes and chuckling throughout. Perhaps one of the largest accomplishments of Four Nights with the Duke, in addition to the entertaining and highly skilled narration by Susan Duerden, is Ms. James’ facility with character development. In that regard, I was highly amused and impressed with her ability to transform what you are initially led to believe is a pompous, self-centered duke into deserving, desirable hero. Moreover, Ms. James was able to take advantage of what at first appears to be the hero’s grandiose view of himself, to add satire and humor, especially given the dual point of view in which this story is written, which allows the listener to know what the heroine is really thinking. Ms. James also weaves in some clever secondary characters that add depth to the story and boost the entertainment factor, such as a drunken uncle whose inebriated declarations many times end up having more truth and social consciousness than anyone else’s polite, sober discourse.
Emilia “Mia” Gwendolyn Carrington grew up with Evandare “Vander” Septimus Brody, the future Duke of Pindar, due to the scandalous affair that her father openly partook in with Vander’s mother, the Duchess of Pindar. Over those years, she developed her own crush on Vander, an infatuation which culminated in a rather disastrous poem, some heated words, and Emilia’s promise to marry any other man before Vander.
Fortunately for Emilia, her later attempts at writing proved a lot more successful as she earned the reputation, under a pen name, as one of the day’s best known romance writers. Notwithstanding her success, however, when her brother passes away, and she finds herself desperately seeking the guardianship of her frail, crippled nephew, she finds herself in quite a quandary. She has a year to marry a man of a high rank and who is in a well-off financial situation or the guardianship of her nephew will fall to her brother-in-law, a wicked man of dubious motivations. Further complicating matters is that she is left at the alter by her previous betrothed with only a couple of weeks left before the deadline expires.
Having no choice, Mia seeks an audience with Vander, whom she proceeds to blackmail into marrying her. Vander has his own clandestine reasons for allowing Mia to be successful in her extortion but forces Mia in return to agree to what he believes will be a torturous marriage. Each year the new Duchess of Pindar will be allowed only four nights with her duke; and even then only on those four nights a year that she begs him to join her in his bed. What Vander never imagined is that it would be he, not her, that would ultimately become the beggar. But can he ever convince her that her HEA truly lies in his arms?
Susan Duerden renders a highly skilled and pleasing narration of Four Nights with the Duke. Having never listened to Ms. Duerden before, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that she was able to produce a wide range of intonations for this colorful cast of characters. Not only did the males and females genuinely sound like their gender, but all characters were generally distinguishable. In that regard, I was impressed with Ms. Duerden’s attention to individual personalities and her ability to imbue each one with unique characteristics.
For example, Vander had an appropriately authoritative and rich intonation which matched his station and position of leadership as compared to most of the other characters. Additionally, the drunken uncle sounds like an older man, with just the right touch of slurring to his speech to convince the listener of his state. Mia sounds like an intelligent, young woman, but not from as high of a class as Vander and his friends, which is befitting of her description. The only area where I had slight difficulty in distinguishing characters was in the few scenes that Vander and his best friend, who is also of a similar class, were both talking. As this affected a very small amount of the dialogue, however, it really didn’t have much of an affect at all on my overall enjoyment of the performance.
Ms. Duerden also perfectly times her delivery to give the plentiful humorous lines their maximum effect. Additionally, you can hear the hero take on an almost breathy quality in the more passionate scenes thereby adding to the feel of the change of the mood between the hero and heroine which appropriately sets the tone for these scenes.
All in all, Four Nights with the Duke delivered on all the fronts I had expected, including a satisfying romance, witty dialogue, a mild suspense overlay and a talented narration.
BJ
Narration: A-
Book Content: B+
Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in
Violence: Minimal/Domestic Violence (affects the background but no detailed descriptions)
Genre: Historical Romance
Publisher: Harper Audio
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