Barking Up the Wrong Tree by Jenn McKinlay

Narrated by Allyson Ryan

I’m a sucker for books with dogs in them. Barking Up the Wrong Tree has not one but two dogs. Plus a dirty-talking parrot. So it probably ought to have been more successful for me than it actually was.

The story starts with Carly DeCusati somewhat improbably inheriting an elderly golden retriever and a parrot with a fondness for swearing from a recently-deceased neighbour. She’s moving back to Bluff Point, Maine, from New York because she was laid off from her job as a lingerie buyer for a department store, so she loads up the animals and heads back to her parents’ house, intent on re-homing the animals as soon as possible and getting a new job in New York with the same speed. Carly does not do commitment.

Carly picks up a handsome guy at a local bar and has a hot one-night stand with him. It’s really unusual in a not-erotic romance to have the banging happen this early on. But it’s not sex Carly has a problem with. It’s the commitment. Which she doesn’t do. Did I mention that already?

James Sinclair fell for Carly at first sight 11 years before when he met her while visiting his cousin at college. He’s determined to prove to Carly that he’s worth a chance and, the small town of Bluff Point gives him an assist because she keeps running into him.

It was actually nice to have a heroine who had a sexual past and wasn’t ashamed of it. It was good to see her enjoy sex without feeling guilty or being slut-shamed by others. I could have wished that there wasn’t a sad story behind Carly’s decision to not have relationships beyond one-night stands but I guess that would be another story.

Structurally the book felt a little odd to me. The courtship/getting to know you stuff mostly happened right at the end. The blurb suggested that James was keeping a secret which was a barrier to their happiness once they started dating. But the secret was out well before then and the dating didn’t happen until way past the halfway mark.

The main conflict, which wasn’t realised until the last third/quarter of the book was really about James’s penchant for rescuing people and animals. He’s a physical therapist and he does that for a living – fixing people. He also has a beagle puppy called “Hot Wheels” with one under-developed hindleg, so Hot Wheels has a harness and wheels to help him get around. Carly doesn’t have a job and is frightened of commitment. These are things James instinctively wants to “fix” for her because he loves her and wants her to be happy and have all the things. And that’s a story I’d have been happy to listen to. There’s meaty conflict there. But it was introduced too late in the piece to fully do it justice and I didn’t really buy the turnaround in either James or Carly over it.

I could imagine cutting sections and moving them around, bringing some things forward and moving others back. That I was thinking this when I was listening indicates I wasn’t as engaged as I’d have liked.

The narration by Allyson Ryan was okay. Technically, there were no audible breath sounds and the production was crisp and clean. I liked that Ms. Ryan had many character voices for the (large) cast but some of them felt forced such that they seemed like caricatures at times.

Ms. Ryan doesn’t have a particularly deep ‘hero voice’ so I occasionally had to rely on dialogue tags to know when James was speaking to Carly.

When Carly says “James! Oh James” in the throes of sexual ecstasy, it sounded high-pitched to my ear and not very sexy. This is a phrase that is used often in the book as a kind of joke between James and Carly so I heard it a lot. But in the text her voice is described as throaty and deep when she is saying it, so there was a disconnect there for me.

Ms. Ryan does however, do good parrot. Ike the bird is far more prominent in the book than Saul the golden retriever (really, it should have been Ike on the cover, not Saul). Ike is salty and grumpy and learns extra bad habits from his time with Carly. He was possibly my favourite character actually.

Barking Up the Wrong Tree wasn’t bad by any means. And when I thought about it, there wasn’t anything particularly slow about the story. But it felt slow. There were times I was a little bored and impatient to move on. There were times I enjoyed it quite a bit. Overall, it was… okay.

Kaetrin