Narrated by Sandra Caldwell
Breaking His Rules is Book 4 in Packard’s Feeling the Heat series, which features a couple of sports heroes as well as an actor and a personal trainer (this book). Book 1, Love in the Afternoon, which was her debut novel about two soap opera stars, felt fresh and fun – a new entry in standard contemporary romance, so I have looked forward to each new book. Unfortunately, this one did not rise to the level of Book 1 in terms of enjoyment.
Melissa Atherton has lost 50 pounds since she started working out with trainer Jake Sawyer less than a year ago. He’s helped her turn her life around, health-wise, and now she is close to her weight loss goal, feeling healthy and good about herself. Except for one issue: her Mean Girl cousin Shauna is getting married, and Melissa needs a date to the wedding. She’s been crushing on Jake since they met, but Jake has a hard and fast rule: no dating clients. In fact, he stakes his entire reputation on that fact. But he’s been attracted to Melissa, too, so he offers to be her escort at the destination wedding where, oh noes, there are no more hotel rooms so they have to share. How will he square his no-dating rule when he has to stay in her room? Worse, how can he keep his hands off her??
This story has a couple of tropes/conceits that are really, really tiresome. First – is this Young Adult? No, but the maturity level of Bridezilla Shauna and Maid of Honor Denise is about 6th grade, and Melissa and her fraternal twin Paige sink to it on many, many occasions. The scathing fat-shaming talk is almost unbearable, but the petty revenge plots of Paige and Melissa don’t give the reader hope that anyone is the adult here. And once again, Packard makes her villains really, really b-b-b-bad to the bone – in this case, the worst villain, Denise, might well be mentally ill. It’s sorta creepy.
Second – Jake’s hard and fast no-dating clients rule to avoid ruining his reputation. Seriously? All around him, wise parents and friends give him thinly veiled advice to reconsider what is really important, but he’s too thick-headed to catch on; once one has established a rule, one cannot risk breaking it, The End. I kept thinking how unrealistic that felt – that’s the conflict here, that he can’t figure out when he’s being a little too inflexible? Yeah, yeah, there’s an “explanation” that did not convince me.
Sandra Campbell’s narration might have been the make-it-or-break-it factor. She’s ok – her pacing is natural enough, without odd pauses or breaths, although there are times it sounds more like she’s reading a children’s book, with a forced patience, while she waits for us to get the message. She does have some traits that sound amateurish; for instance, when delivering the dialog tag “she asked” after a question, often her pitch continues up, as if the tag were part of the question. She does attempt to differentiate the genders by lowering her voice for Jake, but it’s subtle and inconsistent. There was more than one time I was not sure who was speaking. On the whole, the narration was serviceable but mediocre. Combined with the also-serviceable-but-mediocre storyline, the entire experience was pretty second-rate. I didn’t actively dislike it, and I did want to find out how she resolved the anticipated conflict, but it did not have the fun and freshness she showed in Love in the Afternoon, which also had a better narrator.
Melinda
Narration: C-
Book Content: C
Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in
Violence Rating: None
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Publisher: Harlequin Enterprises, Ltd.
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