Narrated by Vivienne Leheny
Julie Particka is a new-to-me author. I admit the first thing that attracted me to this audiobook was the narrator. I enjoyed Vivienne Leheny’s narration in Playing for Keeps so much recently that I was keen to listen to more from her. And that’s how I came to pick up Adventures in Online Dating.
Consultant actuary and single mother, Alexa McIntyre, 42, decides she needs to find a man to be her partner but also (and even, mainly) to be a good role model and stepdad to her three sons. Brendan is age 13, Blake is 9 and Beau is 5. Brendan is getting to that age where girls are interesting and Alexa could use some help. (Her ex-husband was a bit curious to me. He’s presented as a good guy and the boys love and adore him. When he breezes in very occasionally to visit, both Alexa and the boys go to a great deal of effort to demonstrate they are happy and well. Because he’s a free spirit who needs to wander around the world having adventures and can’t stay in one place but if he thinks they’re unhappy or not managing he will stay out of responsibility and be miserable. Or something. He does pay his child support on time which, yay, but I didn’t quite understand why he got such a pass for being so absent all the time. I can’t imagine the boys wouldn’t be scarred by that. Alexa is clearly a better woman than I because I’d be pissed.
Anyway, I digress.)
Alexa is an actuary and so has a passion for numbers and statistics. She has a theory that she can spend 20 minutes with a guy and work out if he’s worth spending any more time on. She has limited time and a specific goal so she develops a plan to spend a few weeks having a series of 20-minute dates in the early afternoons at her local coffee shop, The Bean Counter. (I liked the play on words here as it related to Alexa too.)
Marshall Calloway, owner/operator of The Bean Counter and 10 years Alexa’s junior, has been smitten with Alexa for months. He’s been flirty and charming but she doesn’t take him seriously. He’s not initially all that keen for Alexa to use his café as a dating site but he goes along with it, including helping her out when one of the dates gets particularly obnoxious. (That guy was a douchenozzle but he was also a bit of a caricature too. I didn’t understand why he’d jump through all the hoops he needed to in order to get to a date with Alexa – Alexa has a pre-screening questionnaire – only to be so horrible from the get.)
Marshall wears purple Converse and geeky t-shirts. He quotes Star Wars and Marvel movies and Alexa thinks he’s too much of a boy to be the man her sons need. He is hot though. And she likes him. But he’s too young and too irresponsible. She’s a planner and he’s a pantser. She had that with her ex-husband and doesn’t want it again. She needs stability, reliability and responsibility. So, Marshall can’t be that guy. Right?
Marshall is all in from the beginning and eventually, makes a bet with Alexa which has the effect of her helping out for an hour in the café for the after-school rush of teenagers who need their caffeine fix. (It makes sense in the story, well, mostly.)
As they spend time together, Alexa and Marshall’s chemistry heats up and eventually they start having sex. Great sex. Alexa is very good at compartmentalising and decides that maybe she doesn’t need to find a guy who can do all the things she needs. Maybe she can have a guy for sex, just for her and find a mentor of some kind for the boys. So, she enjoys her fling with Marshall and drops the dating thing for the time being.
Marshall however is not very keen on the keeping him separate from her life plan. He wants to be part of her life. He wants to get to know the boys. He’s not fazed by the prospect of being a stepdad to them. He wants everything with Alexa but until she says otherwise, he will take what he can get.
At one stage, what he could get was a quickie in his tiny office after the after-school rush and at that point I became quite annoyed with Alexa. Marshall wanted dates and time and conversation. He wanted the sex, sure, but he wanted far more than that. He also wanted to spend time with her and her kids. But she had relegated him to the status of fuck buddy and I thought it was pretty unfair of her. If the shoe were on the other foot, it would be a very bad look for a hero.
Some of the issues Alexa had with Marshall were reasonable and I’d have liked for them to be addressed a little more, but I also wanted Alexa to come to the realisation that she had treated Marshall unfairly even before the black moment. Unfortunately, that never came. I would also have liked to see a little more of Marshall being the guy that Alexa thinks he isn’t, seeing him interact with her and her sons but I understood that it didn’t really fit within the story being told.
The narration was great. Ms. Leheny gave Marshall a deeper husky tone and differentiated well between all of the cast, including Alexa’s best friend Payton and the three boys. When I was irritated by Alexa, Ms. Leheny’s narration kept me listening. And, she helped me to see things from Alexa’s side (even though I didn’t always think Alexa’s side was fair). Alexa felt more human and vulnerable through the lens of Ms. Leheny’s performance.
There was a fair amount of humour and banter in the story as well and this was delivered with great comedic timing. The emotion and pacing of the narrative performance were also solid.
I first looked at Adventures in Online Dating because of Ms. Leheny and she definitely didn’t let me down. But I’ll be looking for more from Julie Particka as well because even though Alexa did bug me every now and then, I enjoyed the book a lot.
Kaetrin
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