I Loved You First anthology by Suzanne Enoch, Molly Harper & Karen Hawkins

Narrated by Amanda Ronconi

I Loved You First is an anthology of three contemporary second chance romances. The big selling point for me was Molly Harper and Amanda Ronconi but happily I enjoyed all three novellas.

Take Two by Suzanne Enoch

Eleanor Ross is a famous actress – I imagined her a little like Jennifer Lawrence – her PA is Brian Cafferty. He was a lawyer when they met four years earlier and for a brief time Brian and Elle were engaged. But then she broke it off because he was too good at anticipating her needs and she felt that was a great quality in a PA but not so great in a husband. There’s more to it of course.

Over the intervening years, Elle has fired Brian four times and rehired him five. He sticks around because he has loved her from the beginning and hopes something will change. When Elle is in need of a rescue from the paparazzi and a place to lay low for a few days, Brian whisks her away to a secluded B&B where he finally decides to change things up.

Kisses only, this novella was sweet and charming and a nice opener to the anthology. I did have a couple of questions about what would happen afterwards – would Brian still work for Elle? What would he do instead if he did not? – but I did not doubt their connection or that they belonged together. Brian is a caretaker and not bothered about Elle being the one in the spotlight. I liked both characters very much.

Grade: B

Pasties and Poor Decisions by Molly Harper

As much as this story was the big draw for me, Pasties and Poor Decisions was my least favourite of the three novellas. I still enjoyed it, but I stumbled a little over the premise. Ana Villiers returns to Espoire Island in Michigan after her husband, a venture capitalist, flees the country with his mistress and with the feds after him for various white-collar crimes. I was sympathetic to a teenaged Ana’s desire to leave her small home town (home island?) and try her hand in the big city but I was less sympathetic to adult Ana’s plight at the beginning of the story. Ana seemed to be well aware that her husband had been doing nefarious things, even if she had no personal part in them. She was upset more that he ran off with someone else rather than with her. This did not make me inclined to like her. Ana does come to the realisation that she’d been as she put it, an “asshole” which certainly made me like her better, but I really didn’t like that she didn’t seem to care much about her husband’s victims.

Ned Fitzroy is the one she left behind when she fled Espoire Island immediately after high school graduation. He went away to college but returned to the island he loves and has a contracting and house restoration business.

As it happens, Ana needs to renovate her only asset, Fishscale House (which is fortunately in her own name) so that she can sell it and not be destitute, and this puts Ned into her orbit again.

(There seemed to be a bit of a problem with the timeline here also because she must have been about 18 when she left, she worked multiple jobs in New York until she was 25 when she married Sebastian and has two daughters who were college age/college age-adjacent but she’d only been away for 20 years. I’m not great at maths but that didn’t add up to me.)

I did feel sorry that Ana’s daughters seemed to be not great people and chose Sebastian over Ana, at least initially. I also felt sorry for Ned at Ana’s abandonment of him with no warning all those years earlier.

Fortunately, given my misgivings about Ana, the story takes place over a number of months and in that time, Ana becomes a much nicer person. She was perhaps lucky that Ned is a really good guy but in the end I liked more about the story than I did not.

Grade: B-

The Last Chance Motel by Karen Hawkins

Evan Graham is a workaholic businessman who’s lost touch with his wife. Jessica Cho Graham has finally had enough and has served him with divorce papers and moved out of their Atlanta home. Evan tracks Jess down to The Last Chance Motel, a place she’s renovating, where he hopes to convince her to give him a second chance.

Unsurprisingly, Evan has a lot to learn and needs a fair bit of self-examination. At heart though, he loves his wife and he’s seeing that in order to have a hope of keeping her in his life he’s going to have to make some big changes.

For me, this novella was the pick of the bunch. I liked the changes that Evan made, and I believed them. I liked that he was prepared to do whatever it took to save his marriage and he really committed to it and I liked that Jess decided she needed to be better about telling Evan what she really thought and standing up for her own wants and needs. 

There was also a delightful touch of whimsy in the novella the origin of which I saw coming but I won’t spoil it here.

This one is also kisses only. I found the entire novella very satisfying.

Grade: B+

Amanda Ronconi narrates all three novellas and they are all extremely well done, as I’ve come to expect from her. She delivers with the emotion and tone of the stories, sometimes snark, sometimes humour, sometimes something more serious but always fitting.

My one criticism is something which becomes really obvious in any anthology with the same narrator – all the main character voices are essentially the same. So, Brian sounded the same as Ned sounded the same as Evan and Elle sounded the same as Ana who sounded the same as Jessica. This is not at all uncommon amongst narrators no matter how broad their range of character voices is and it’s something that I can usually overlook or, at least, manage, by listening to different audiobooks in between. This gives my brain a chance to “reset” so I can more easily accept the new incarnation. In I Loved You First, that mindset less easy to achieve, as each novella was hard up against the other. 

The characters themselves were all quite different but on audio, I rely so much on the sound of the narrator that some of those differences became less obvious. That’s not really on Amanda Ronconi; it’s something that would likely apply to just about every narrator I listen to.

Each novella is entertaining and the anthology as a whole is a win but were I to listen again, perhaps I’d take a break for a podcast or two in between each story to make it easier for my brain to reset.

Kaetrin

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