Lady Sarah’s Sinful Desires by Sophie Barnes

Narrated by Rebecca Rogers

Sometimes – if you’re lucky – you can start a book or audio and know pretty much straight away that you’re going to enjoy it. And sometimes – if you’re UNlucky – you pick one up and immediately know the opposite. That’s what happened to me when I started listening to Lady Sarah’s Sinful Desires. In the (almost) three years I’ve been reviewing for AudioGals, I think I’ve only DNFed one, perhaps two titles, but this came close to being the third. I know part of the reviewer’s lot is to take the rough with the smooth, so along with the “OMG, awesome!” listens, there are going to be a proportion of “Meh, okay, but won’t listen again” ones. This one, however, was one of the “OMG, why am I subjecting myself to this?” kind.

(The answer to that question, by the way, is so that I can tell you, dear readers, which audiobooks to avoid with a ten-foot pole. Or, in this case, a twenty-foot one.)

The story is simple. Lady Sarah, daughter of the Earl of Andover, made the mistake, a couple of years earlier, of allowing the young man she thought she was going to marry to take more liberties than she should have done. (This isn’t a spoiler – it is revealed early on). Fortunately for her, word about her indiscretion hasn’t spread, but she has been rendered unmarriageable nonetheless, because young ladies are expected to be pure on their wedding nights. Being desperate to get her off their hands, her father and nasty step-mother have found her a suitor, an old letch thirty years her senior with daughters of his own (who are older than Sarah) who is so desperate to get his hands on her young, nubile body that he is prepared to overlook her lack of virginity. Knowing she has no alternative, Sarah agrees to the match. She has to marry if her sisters’ reputations are not to be tarnished and Mr Denison has also made her father an attractive business proposition in order to seal the deal.

Christopher, Viscount Spencer, has sworn off love and marriage because his heart was broken by a faithless hussy five years before, and now thinks that every young woman who so much as talks to him is aiming to trap him into marriage. Naturally, he assumes this about Sarah on first meeting her, but she quickly disabuses him of that notion, not only by firmly putting him in his place verbally, but by telling him she’s promised elsewhere.

But of course, the two are drawn to each other; Christopher, or “Kip” as his family calls him (I confess, I’ve never come across Kip as a diminutive of Christopher – I always thought it was Kit) likes Sarah’s willingness to challenge him, and she likes… well, likes HIM. He’s sweet and a bit nerdy in addition to being devastatingly handsome, rich and titled, and his sisters immediately take to Sarah and start trying to match-make. Surely a young, gorgeous viscount would be a better marital bargain than the old letch? But – oh, woe is she – Sarah can’t possibly fall for Christopher, because she couldn’t bear for him to think badly of her. And what will happen if he finds out she’s “used goods”? [*spoiler* – he says nasty things and goes off in a sulk.] But the thing I really didn’t like was the way Sarah is constantly made to feel so ashamed that she puts up with the horrid treatment meted out to her by her parents and believes she is unworthy of love or happiness. Such passivity is quite possibly historically accurate, but as a romantic heroine, it makes her a real wet-blanket.

I’ve often said that I really like stories in which the romance IS the story. Too often, books are cluttered up with so many other plotlines that the romance is sidelined or nor properly developed; so I love a good, character-driven tale in which the central relationship takes centre stage. In Lady Sarah’s Sinful Secret, however, the pacing was so slow, the writing and characters so bland that I was DESPERATE FOR SOMETHING TO HAPPEN. A kidnapped baby, a madwoman in the attic, zombies, aliens – anything to keep me awake while I was listening!

To make matters worse, this is one of those times when a poor story is paired with poor narration, making it even more of a non-starter. Rebecca Rogers is a new-to-me narrator, although she has almost fifty titles to her credit at Audible, and on the positive side, she has a pleasant, slightly husky voice in the contralto range which reminded me slightly of Corrie James, a narrator I always enjoy. Her gender differentiation is decent as she doesn’t have to strain in order to sustain a lowered pitch for the male characters, and she does a good job making the odious Mr Denison sound suitably lecherous and smarmy.

On the downside, her pacing so slow that it made an already dull story even more difficult to engage with, and I’m afraid her accent is a BIG no-no. Ms Rogers is American and I’m afraid that listening to a British historical narrated in an American accent is almost guaranteed to put me off (Kirsten Potter and Xe Sands get a free pass because they read dialogue using English accents – also, Joanna Bourne and Anne Stuart write much more engaging stories!). While Ms Rogers attempts to tone down her accent, it ends up somewhere in the Atlantic; much closer to East Coast “posh” Bostonian (I’m thinking Kelsey Grammar and David Hyde Pearce in Frasier) than it is to English shores. I know this is one of those things that ends up coming down to personal choice and that it may not bother some people. But it bothered me big time, and made it very difficult to listen to the story instead of to the constant mispronunciations (dool instead of dew-el, cant instead of cah –n’t, d’COR instead of DAY-cor – and worst of all, dook instead of dew-ke (duke)); and the hang-ons of the American accent such as the rhotic (pronounced) ‘r’. In British English – at least in the sort of upper-class dialect the narrator is trying to imitate – we don’t pronounce the ‘r’ on the end of the word ‘mother’, for example, but Ms Rogers does it there and on every other word that ends in an ‘r’ or, like ‘word’ has an ‘r’ in it.

Harper Collins’ Avon imprint is one of the top brands when it comes to historical romance, and has a number of highly popular and well-known authors on its roster; so I’d expect their audio division to be pairing those authors up with top narrators. However, this is the fourth audiobook I’ve listened to recently in which the mis-match of book and narrator has served their authors poorly. I gave Mandy Williams a C for her narration of Eva Leigh’s Scandal Takes the Stage, Ruth Urquhart a C+ for her performance in Gayle Callen’s The Wrong Bride and Justine Eyre (who I know is very experienced, but is not right for a British historical) a C for her narration in Sarah MacLean’s The Rogue Not Taken. I’ve decided not to review (or purchase) a number of their upcoming titles because they are using narrators with whom I’m either unfamiliar or who aren’t – in my opinion – up to the job. I know that everyone has to start somewhere, and it’s not that these narrators are bad or horribly inexperienced; they are just not right for these particular books.

Back to the case in hand; Lady Sarah’s Sinful Secret is the first in a series that I certainly won’t be continuing to listen to. The story is dull, the characterisation is bland and the narration does nothing to enliven either. Move on to something else. Quickly.

Caz

Narration: D

Book Content: D

Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in

Violence Rating: Minimal

Genre: Historical Romance

Publisher: Harper Audio

Lady Sarah's Sinful Desires was provided to AudioGals by Harper Audio for a review.