Narrated by Callie Dalton and Calum Gittins
I’m a sucker for Zapata’s sllllloooooowwwww burn romances, even at 15+ hours, which is a really slow burn. Plus, bonus for me, The Best Thing takes place not just in my hometown but in my neighborhood, although the story is not really site-specific or anything. I just think it’s the first time I’ve run across my neighborhood in a novel. And double bonus, new-to-me narrator Calum Gittins, native born New Zealander, reads the Kiwi rugby player hero like a champ!
Elena “Lenny” DeMaio is a prickly, scrappy heroine – she was a world class, Olympic-level athlete before injury; she was raised by her Grandpa Gus to be open and brutally honest with a take-no-prisoners attitude, all hiding her inner porcupine soft spots that come from a childhood where your mom leaves you, your dad dies, and even Grandpa’s ex-wife (aka Grandma) isn’t interested in you. Well, fuck ’em all. She got the message from Gus:
Jonah Collins is a ghost. Well, no, he’s real enough, but he’s ghosted everyone, including Lenny – when she needed him the most. He’s a world class athlete as well – a famous New Zealand rugby player with his own inner soft spots, one of which is his overwhelming shyness. When he suffers a career-threatening injury, including a head trauma and crushed ankle, his reaction is to ghost his family, the press, everyone who is knocking down his door asking him what’s next – and Lenny, for more than a year.
But it would deprive you of the long, slow burn for me to tell you more about why and how he slowly inched his way back under her skin and into her life. It was all totally worth it to me – especially for the heart-clutching epilogue which takes place 30 years later. (have a hankie handy) However, plenty of reviewers felt the opposite, so YMMV.
There were some – hmm, call them inconsistencies, in the story. Two-dimensional characters were brought in to provide some tension but never really explored, and in a book this long you’d think a childhood/life-long best friend and a grandmother might deserve slightly more real estate if they are going to be shown at all. The build-up for best friend Noah left me scratching my head: that’s it? And while I awaited Jonah’s explanation of his disappearing act, I had envisioned much darker scenarios than his reveal. Plus – was Lenny ever going to let Jonah talk or what? There were secrets that really weren’t secrets, and some made me wonder why they were secrets at all.
The style of narration for this was “duet”, sort of. The story is told in Lenny’s first person POV, so Callie Dalton narrates every single word of it except the actual spoken dialogue of Jonah, which is read by Calum Gittins. Dalton is an experienced narrator, with a great grasp of Zapata’s work (having read almost all of them) – I like her young, mid-range voice for Zapata’s heroines, plus her differentiation, while mild, lets you know instantly who is speaking. Honestly, now I can’t even recall her accents for Jonah’s family members – at one point, I realized the entire narration was so smooth I didn’t even notice who was reading when several characters were in a scene, even though sometimes the male voice was Dalton and other times it was Gittins. That’s the mark of good audiobook production – the story is the focus. Gittins was really perfect for this – his quiet voice was exactly what was to be expected from the “gentle giant” Jonah, soft-spoken, polite, almost reverent at times. It’s hard to evaluate things like pacing and differentiation when he only has one character’s spoken dialogue to voice, but I sure hope we all get to hear more of Gittins’ work in romance narration!
Melinda
Buy The Best Thing by Mariana Zapata on Amazon
