Earls Just Want to Have Fun by Shana Galen

Narrated by Beverley A. Crick

A few months back, I listened to and reviewed The Rogue You Know, the second book in Shana Galen’s Covent Garden Cubs series. At that point, I’d heard narrator Beverley A. Crick only one other time and had been sufficiently impressed by her performance to want to listen to her again. I’ve since listened to her a few more times, and as I’d enjoyed both story and performance in Rogue, I decided to back-track and pick up its predecessor, Earls Just Want to Have Fun.

The book is a kind of mix of Cinderella and Pygmalion, as our Eliza – in this case, a street-urchin by the name of Marlowe – gets to see how the other half lives after she is abducted by the investigator hired to trace the whereabouts of a girl who went missing some fifteen years earlier. It’s an enjoyable and well-written story that has more depth than its overly-cutesy song-title appellation might suggest.

Marlowe is a member of the Covent Garden Cubs, one of the many gangs of thieves who inhabit the rookeries in the Seven Dials area of London. She’s a thief and pickpocket, and like all the members of the gang, lives in fear of its brutal leader, Satin. She has dim memories of once being called by another name and of living a different life, but she has learned to dismiss those as dreams, something she has conjured up as a way of escaping the privations of life in the slums.

Maxwell Derring, Earl of Dane, is a young man who takes his responsibilities to his title, his family and his country very seriously. In fact, he is feeling rather pleased with himself over his most recent speech in Parliament which helped to quash a bill which would have allocated more funds to the poor. It’s not that he’s a bad person – it’s just that like many, he is of the belief that poor people are poor by choice, lazy and don’t help themselves and that the money could be better spent elsewhere, such as in helping farmers to increase food production, or shoring up the defence of the realm. When he allows his brother, the renowned investigator Sir Brook, to borrow his carriage one evening, Dane suddenly finds himself in much closer proximity to “the poor” than he’d ever expected or wanted – and he isn’t at all happy about it.

The first part of the book is delightfully fluffy, with these two characters from different worlds warily circling each other even as the sparks fly. As far as Dane is concerned, Marlowe is just waiting for the opportunity to slit his throat and run off with the family jewels; she’s a menace to society and he can’t wait to be rid of her. And to Marlowe, Dane is a stuck-up prig and she wants nothing more than to get away from him. Chafing at their enforced proximity, they fight the reluctant attraction that simmers between them, well aware that there is no future for an earl and a street-rat.

Things take darker turn later in the book, however, when Marlowe has to face up to the fact that it’s only a matter of time before Satin locates her and forces her to return to the gang – or worse. It’s here that the real truth of Marlowe’s situation hits Dane fully, and their journey through the slums affects him deeply and irrevocably. In the same way as Ms Galen highlights the immense gap between rich and poor through Marlowe’s reaction to the opulence of Derring House, she brings home to the hero – and the listener – the true horror of the plight faced by people forced to eke out a miserable existence in a place where crime and disease are rife, life is cheap and there is no hope of anything better.

For all that, though, the author never loses sight of the fact that this is a romance, and the relationship between Dane and Marlowe is very well developed. The couple has great chemistry, their verbal sparring is sharp and funny and the love scenes are sensual; in spite of their very different backgrounds, they are clearly a well-matched couple.

Having listened to a number of Beverley A. Crick’s narrations by now, I knew to expect an enjoyable and skilled performance. Her pacing is excellent and she’s a terrific vocal actress, immersing herself in the story and picking up all the emotional cues in such a way that really draws the listener in. Her portrayal of the central characters is very good indeed, with Marlowe being a real stand-out. The cockney accent she adopts is perfect and she captures the essence of the character, tough, funny and passionate, but with an underlying vulnerability she keeps well-hidden. Ms Crick has a fairly ‘standard’ hero voice, I’ve discovered, but it’s nicely modulated and attractive, leaving the listener in no doubt as to the hero’s masculinity, and she has a good range of voices for the female characters in the story, from the rather snooty Lady Dane to Marlowe’s Seven Dials landlady. She gives the villainous Satin a suitably gruff, weaselly tone, and as with Rogue, has adopted cockney accents for the Cubs, even though they aren’t written out in the text. The one character who is perhaps less successfully portrayed is Sir Brook Derring, whose slightly nasal, high-pitched delivery doesn’t fit the image of him as a successful detective and the future hero of his own book.

In terms of her overall performance in this audiobook, however, that is a very minor issue, and not one that worried me to any great extent. Earls Just Want to Have Fun is a thoroughly enjoyable listen and one I’m happy to recommend.

Caz

Narration: B+

Book Content: B+

Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in

Violence Rating: Minimal

Genre: Historical Romance

Publisher: Tantor Audio

Earls Just Want to Have Fun was provided to AudioGals by Tantor Audio for a review.

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