Narrated by Ron Butler
I’ve been meaning to try a Brenda Jackson book for the longest time but perhaps I ought not to have started with book 4 of a series. At Long Last is what I believe is the last book in the Playa series about the Montgomery family. Much of it stands alone quite well but there is a fair bit about a previous couple (which has an impact on some significant characters in this book) which probably would have made a lot more sense to me had I read the earlier book about Lance and Asia.
Logan Montgomery, 40, is the eldest sibling in the family. He is a plastic surgeon (mostly doing reconstructive work) based in Tampa, Florida. He has been in love with his sister-in-law’s sister, Claire (ie Asia’s sister) for three years, basically since he first met her. Claire doesn’t know anything about it though. He has been biding his time before making a move. Claire is a foreign diplomat, currently based in Algiers. Logan knows he wants a wife and a family and he knows that Claire’s long-term plans are to come back to the US. He is not into long distance relationships so he is waiting.
However, those plans are brought forward when a bombing in Algiers, from which Claire had a lucky escape, causes her to come home for some leave, traumatised from the loss of dear friends and colleagues. Logan can’t stay away and heads to Washington DC where she is, with a plan to spend time with her and help her recover from the trauma and also to make her fall in love with him. He’s pretty confident he’ll succeed. He’s convinced they’re meant to be.
It all sounds pretty romantic and a lot of it was but Logan irritated me with his “I know best” attitude. It came through often; he would not tell Claire what was really going on because he decided she was not ready to hear it. Perhaps she wasn’t but the high-handedness Logan used when making these unilateral decisions for her bothered me.
Claire is very commitment-shy, having lost a fiancé to the war in Afghanistan when she was in college. She prefers not to risk her heart. She’s game for a fling, once she notices Logan as more than a friend, but she’s not thinking about the long term at all.
At Long Last is a three-fer, with a gentle romance for the Montgomery patriarch, Jeremiah, as well as a bonus romance for Sean Cruz – a character who evidently featured strongly in Lance and Asia’s book. (It was mostly in this storyline that I felt the lack of not having read Lance and Asia’s book – Sean had previously been Asia’s fiancé and there was something about his brother, David, the details of which escaped me. I gather he’s a jerk but exactly how he was a jerk is something I guess I’ll have to read the earlier book to find out about). This third romance story was a bit of a surprise actually; it began well into the book. Suddenly there was a new POV character and a whole other story going on. I didn’t hate it; but I mention it because it’s unusual in terms of the typical structure of a romance novel.
Everybody gets a happy ending and there are brief updates on the other Montgomery siblings and their happy marriages. Those who have read or listened to the earlier book will no doubt appreciate them but I didn’t find them intrusive.
I wasn’t entirely sure what rating to give the steam level for At Long Last. The book has explicit sex scenes but the language is not very explicit – in fact at times it was a little too purple and euphemistic for me. It turns out I prefer frank language. Who knew?
The narration, by Ron Butler, was pretty solid, if a titch slow in pace. I found myself wishing it could be sped up just a little bit.
I appreciated that Mr. Butler is African American and so is authentically portraying the characters, the bulk of whom are also African American. There’s a rhythm to the language which he delivers exactly the way it’s meant to be done.
The female character voices were not very female-sounding to me. I could, for the most part, tell the characters apart within a conversation, apart from when Claire or one of the other women was exclaiming (perhaps because of upset, perhaps in pleasure). Then, the women did sound like women. Maybe had those higher pitched tones been used more often I’d have thought they went into falsetto territory though? I can’t really say because these exclamations were few and far between and very short. I expect I’d need a longer sample to really tell.
I do prefer female characters to sound a bit more female than Mr. Butler portrayed but I got used to his style during the course of the listen. As I didn’t really have trouble distinguishing the characters in a conversation it was more a preference thing than a necessity.
At Long Last was perhaps not the best entry into Brenda Jackson’s extensive backlist I could have chosen; mainly because I thought both Logan and Sean were often too high-handed in their approach and just a tad under-handed too in their detailed campaigns to win their ladies. I’m sure I’ve listened to other books where similar strategies were used and I haven’t always had that reaction. Maybe I’m getting more sensitive as I age, maybe I wouldn’t ever like it now. I did notice that in Claire’s case and also Liz’s (Sean’s HEA) they were both extremely successful, competent women – something about a campaign to change their minds from their stated desires, with the implicit assumption they were wrong and the men knew what was best, rubbed me the wrong way. Also too, Liz made a decision (which I won’t spoil here) that I struggled with also. Sean let her off very easily I thought.
Still, it’s not many books that give the listener three HEAs for the price of one and I am ever and always a fan of the HEA.
Kaetrin
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