Narrated by Mary Sarah
Having read and enjoyed a couple of Elisa Braden’s books in print, when I saw that her Rescued from Ruin series was coming to audio, I immediately decided to pick up one of them for review. I’ve never heard of narrator Mary Sarah, but I listened to the sample (of another book) on Tantor’s website and decided it was worth the risk, so I requested a copy of The Truth About Cads and Dukes, the second book in the series.
Well, it just goes to show you can’t set too much store by samples, because it wasn’t long before I was holding my head in agony at the constant stream of mispronunciations and Ms. Sarah’s manner of speaking in an odd kind of sotto voce almost-whisper. The mispronunciations are those typically made when American narrators attempt British accents – turning the flat ‘a’ (as in ‘hat’) into an elongated ‘ah’, so that instead of ‘back’ we get ‘bahck’ and instead of ‘fact’, we get ‘fahct. When she should elongate the ‘a’, she doesn’t, and ‘father’ becomes ‘fother’ and ‘aunt’ becomes ‘ont’. Other highlights include a laughing ‘stook’ (stock), one character going to the ‘dorks’ (docks) – and the most heinous of all, the word ‘duke’ is NOT pronounced ‘dook’. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Why do audio publishers never learn? If you can’t get Kate Reading, Barrie Kreinik or Saskia Maarleveld, then USE A BRITISH NARRATOR.
The problem for yours truly, then, is that these things, once heard, can’t be unheard, and it makes it difficult to concentrate on the actual story. But for you, dear readers, I girded my loins, hitched up my big-girl knickers and got stuck in.
The story itself is decent enough and employs a couple of favourite tropes, the marriage of convenience and the Plain-Jane who snares the most eligible bachelor on the marriage mart. Lady Jane Huxley, one of the daughters of the Earl and Countess of Berne, is a perennial wallflower, her preference for books rather than people meaning she has few friends and even fewer marriage prospects. She is surprised when the handsome Colin Lacey, younger brother of the Duke of Blackmore, strikes up a conversation with her; but even though she is a little suspicious, he doesn’t attempt to flatter or flirt with her, and she relaxes into a friendship with him. Sadly, however, Jane’s naïvéte and her loneliness have led her astray, and it turns out that Colin’s ‘friendship’ was born of a wager – a wager he desperately needs to win in order to pay off a large debt to a very unsavoury character. When Jane’s unwitting attempt to help Colin goes disastrously wrong and leaves her reputation in tatters, it seems she is doomed to spinsterhood – and not only that, but her tarnished name will have a detrimental effect on the matrimonial prospects of her younger sisters.
Harrison Lacey**, Duke of Blackmore is furious with his brother – whom he had cut off some months previously owing to a particularly awful scandal (to which we are not made privy until later – although it may well have happened in the first book in the series, which I haven’t read or listened to). He is determined to uphold his family honour at all cost, so, unwilling to lumber Jane with a life of misery with his scapegrace brother, Harrison approaches her father to ask for her hand and is granted permission to marry her.
Jane has met the duke on only a few occasions and had found him somewhat haughty and pompous. The idea of being married to him simply in order to satisfy the demands of family honour is not a particularly appealing one, but if she is not to drag her family down with her, she has no alternative, and before long, Jane is the Duchess of Blackmore.
The story proceeds as one might expect, with this unlikely couple trying to adjust to married life, and not without a few lumps and bumps along the way. Harrison is one of those heroes who conceals such volcanic passion beneath his ice-cold exterior that it terrifies him; he values calm and order, and the fact that his new wife – whom society has dubbed plain but who, to him, is nothing of the sort – drives him mad with lust is something he must subjugate if he is to carry on with the orderly life he has carved out for himself. The thing is, that once Jane cottons on to what’s really going on and takes steps to demolish those walls, he continues to erect them and to push her way, for reasons I couldn’t quite make out, or which didn’t make sense. The way that Jane gradually comes into her own is one of the story’s strengths, and I was pleased that she decided not to wait around for her husband to make up his mind about her and realised she deserved more than he seemed prepared to offer her.
Ms. Braden is a strong writer and is able to create interesting, attractive characters and plotlines, but here, if feels as though she’s trying to cram in too much. Colin gets a fair bit of ‘screen time’ (his story is the next book, Desperately Seeking a Scoundrel), and in the early stages, I actually thought he was the hero of this one, as we saw far more of him than of his brother. Then, after Jane and Harrison are married, we get the nasty, lip-curling ‘should-have-been-me’ rival who comes to stay and make Jane’s life a misery; Harrison’s jealousy of Jane’s friendship with his brother, an attempted kidnapping for ransom… in the second half of the book especially, the characters lurch from crisis to crisis, and it all got a bit much. And while Jane’s character is quite well drawn (if a bit stereotypical), I found it difficult to get a handle on Harrison, who has pretty much one defining trait – the ice-man who doesn’t want all those emotional cooties making him feel… stuff.
I’ve already said that the constant barrage of mispronunciations made The Truth about Cads and Dukes a difficult listen; and when I say constant, I mean constant – pretty much every sentence has at least one mistake. When it comes to other aspects of her performance, Ms. Sarah’s pacing is good, as is the degree of expression she injects into her narration. But her character differentiation is fairly minimal – she does a reasonable job with the male characters, and it’s easy to tell the difference between the men and the women, but the men all sound very similar and so do the women. In scenes between Harrison and Colin, I had to rely on dialogue tags, although the female characters fare a little better – in the scenes between Jane and her friend Victoria, or Jane and her mother, it’s clear there is more than one person speaking. The minor characters, such as servants, are given these weird, pseudo-Irish sort of accents which are just plain… odd.
Sadly, it seems the series title – Rescued from Ruin – is, in audio, a misnomer, because the narration does precisely the opposite. What should have been at the very least an entertaining though undemanding listen, is dragged down by a narrator unsuited to an English-set historical romance.
**[As a side note, I can’t believe a nineteenth century peer of the realm would be named “Harrison”. It’s too modern and too American, IMO].
Caz
Buy The Truth About Cads and Dukes by Elisa Braden on Amazon
