Narrated by Tatiana Sokolov
In More Than Neighbors, Meredith Price returns to her home town of Blackberry Bay in New Hampshire with her six-year-old daughter, Sophie. As a teenager, she left the bay to attend college in California and met Devon Price, married him and settled on the west coast. Then, two years ago, Devon was killed in a car accident and Meredith’s life turned upside down. After struggling to find her feet she is going back home where she will be closer to her parents (but not too close!) and where she and Sophie can have a fresh start.
She has purchased a two-bedroom contemporary lakefront house over the internet and the story begins as Meredith and Sophie arrive at their new home with their pet dog, a Bichon Frise named Oscar.
The property next door is an older cottage, painted pink and turquoise, with plastic flowers in the window boxes, once owned by a quirky old lady, Carolina Archambault. Recently deceased, Carolina left her estate (which includes a grumpy cat named Eleanor) to her grandson Cam Maguire. Cam didn’t even know he had a grandmother until he got the letter from the lawyer. His mother had an affair with his biological dad, Carolina’s son, during a brief separation from her husband, Cam’s legal father. It was something of an open secret that Cam was not his father’s biological son but nobody in the Maguire family ever really talked about it. Cam has moved from New York into the cottage for the summer and is working remotely while he puts the estate to rights and learns about his roots, mostly from Carolina’s old journals.
Sparks fly between Cam and Meredith immediately but it takes a little while for a solid friendship to form between Cam and the Price women and even longer before there’s any romance between the adults.
The essential conflict in the book isn’t about Meredith recovering from her grief and being ready to move on or about Sophie accepting a new man in her life as a father figure; it’s all about whether Cam will stay in Blackberry Bay or move back to New York. (I think the answer is obvious – this is a romance, after all.)
When I say “conflict” there’s not a lot of it. It’s a gentle ride with small town charm as the pair get to know one another and as Cam decompresses from the Manhattan rat race and as Meredith reconnects with childhood friends. Perhaps there were some missed opportunities with Carolina’s journals – there were some parts of the story which were told via journal entries but I was a little surprised by the reveal of a key piece of information being little more than aside.
Still, low-tension books have their place and in this hell year of 2020 perhaps even more so than usual. Some of my friends on Twitter gratefully accepted my recommendation for this one precisely because there’s not a lot of conflict.
The narration was good but not perhaps not quite up to the usual standard I’ve come to expect from Ms. Sokolov. It was a little staccato at times and there were a few too many pauses in odd places which tended to confuse the meaning of a sentence a little or halt the flow of the story, and a couple of instances where the wrong character voice was used in dialogue. However, the narration was still engaging and enjoyable, with good differentiation between the cast, especially for Sophie and Carolina.
Ms. Sokolov delivers on the emotion of the story and conveys the charm of Blackberry Bay. While not her very best narration, it was oceans away from bad.
For listeners who are looking for a low-angst story with characters who are smart and kind, More Than Neighbors hits the spot.
Kaetrin
Buy More Than Neighbors by Shannon Stacey on Amazon
