Dr. Strange Beard by Penny Reid

Narrated by Chris Brinkley & Chloe Miller

I have all of the Winston Brothers books on my digital TBR but haven’t carved out any time to read them yet. I’ve heard good things and I know the Winston heroes in particular are particularly beloved by a large section of Romancelandia. When the review request came in for Dr. Strange Beard with a note that the book stands alone well, I thought it was good opportunity to actually get to one; my TBL is smaller than the TBR of Doom after all.

Roscoe Winston is a 26-year-old veterinarian, with an eidetic memory. Nobody else seems to know this however which felt odd to me but there you go. (Did people not notice?) Roscoe’s memory is more of a bug than a feature for him though. He remembers everything; painful memories are always fresh and never fade. When he was 16, his then-best friend, Simone Payton (also 16) gave him a very painful memory and he’s been avoiding her ever since.

Simone is back in Green Valley, Tennessee, working undercover in her parents’ donut shop. She is actually an FBI agent and is the contact for an informant who is giving the Bureau information about a serial killer.

Roscoe’s estranged (and very shitty) father, is a potential witness and also a wanted criminal so the FBI want to get their hands on him to see if he will flip on who they believe is the killer. Simone is tasked to get close to Roscoe because Roscoe’s dad has developed a sudden interest in reconnecting with him.

This forces Simone and Roscoe in proximity to one another and feelings emerge/re-emerge.

Roscoe is indeed a charming hero. He is a virgin because he does not want to form important memories with someone he doesn’t really care about and he’s been in love with Simone since he was a teenager. She’s basically it for him. You have to love a devoted hero!

Simone is a Black woman and this causes her some difficulties with a local cop who is a racist. While I appreciated that the cast is diverse and important issues like Black Lives Matter were addressed in the book, there were times I felt a little uncomfortable. I don’t know the answer but I wondered whether a white author was best placed to address them? And, to add an Inception layer here, as a white person myself it’s probably irrelevant what I think about it.

Dr. Strange Beard is billed as a romantic comedy but the humour didn’t always work for me. I’m not sure if I was in particularly grumpy mood when I was listening or whether my sense of humour is different to the author’s or whether there was something about the delivery which didn’t gel but either way, I often recognised things that were supposed to be funny but which, to me at least, weren’t.

I did laugh sometimes though – sometimes the humour worked really well – for instance when Simone goes off on a mental tangent about how to “deflower her man-maiden”.

And, speaking of tangents… well my biggest issue with the book was that there were an awful lot of them. I’m a fairly direct person so following a meandering path to get somewhere doesn’t tend to work well for me. Particularly in the beginning, Roscoe kept having “memory intrusions” – either on purpose or involuntarily. This was kind of annoying for two reasons; one – the thing that was happening was interrupted by the memories so it took a long time for the thing that was happening to actually happen and two – I couldn’t always tell what was a memory and what was happening at the time.  Fortunately, the memory intrusions became less frequent as the book went on.

Both Roscoe and Simone go off on tangents all the time though and I was often impatient for some action rather than just talking or thinking about action.

I enjoyed the narration by Chris Brinkley more than that from Chloe Miller (who narrates the bulk of the story). Ms. Miller had some strange pronunciations. For instance, she said “larry-inx” instead of “lar-inx” for larynx and she said “tusami” instead of “tsunami”. Also, there was a family in the book with the surname Sylvester but it was pronounced “Savester”. There were other examples.

Still, apart from the mispronunciations, both narrations were technically well enough done, with fairly good pitch and tone.

Both narrators demonstrated a good range of accents. Chris Brinkley’s female character voices were better overall than Ms. Miller’s male voices. That said, Ms. Miller did enough to differentiate between cast members and it was certainly enough for me to recognise who was speaking.

Mostly my issues with the audiobook came from the story. It seemed like a lot of description with little action for a long time. Things only started getting really interesting for me at about Chapter 18 – which is a long time. I’m all about the romance and the romance didn’t really get moving until then. Prior to that it was a lot of dancing around one another which is something I found frustrating. If I hadn’t been committed to reviewing the title, I may have given up. Which would have been a shame because after Chapter 18 there was a significant step up in the pace of the story. There was still a little too much description and thinking and asides but more was happening.

I’m sure that for those listeners who connect more with the humour of Dr. Strange Beard, the book will work much better than it did for me. Even so, I did end up liking the story, albeit after a slow start.

Kaetrin