Try Right by Jill Brashear

Narrated by Teddy Hamilton and Mackenzie Cartwright

Try Right is book 3 in Brashear’s Aloha series, set in 1968. Claudia is a well-known and sought after Hollywood actress until a scandal all but ruins her career, sending her to the set of a lesser movie in a small part, filmed on location in Hawaii. This wasn’t Claudia’s first time in Hawaii – 6 years earlier, just out of high school, she and a friend vacationed there. While taking surfing lessons, a Hawaiian surfing instructor named Keoni saved her life – and she is determined now to find him and properly thank him. She has spent the last 6 years dreaming of the handsome man whose heart she broke – and now she has the opportunity to re-connect.

Henry, also known as Champ, is a stunt man on the set of the film Claudia is working on. He feels an immediate attraction to the woman he meets as “Janice” – he doesn’t recognize her from her earlier, acclaimed performance in the movie Jezebel. When he sees her on the Hawaiian set, later, confusion reigns. She assumed he recognized her all along but just went along with her ruse but now she’s charmed to learn he was attracted to her anyway. Even if she wasn’t recognizable by someone in the industry.

This is a really slow-burn, friends-to-lovers relationship, as Henry tries to reconcile his feelings for Claudia, who he knew only as the woman Keoni had dreamed of. Henry is acquainted with Keoni – not really friends – and thinks of Keoni as a womanizer who doesn’t deserve her. He wants to help Claudia any way he can, but he’s conflicted about reuniting the two. Claudia, meanwhile, is on a one-woman mission to have a do-over with Keoni. She enjoys flirting with Henry but can’t seem to see the forest for the trees here – because Henry is the one who excites her, appreciates her, and is there for her. Keoni actually stands her up when they set a date, but she keeps trying.

Vintage romance is an interesting genre for someone like me who remembers the 1960s – okay, as a child, but still! Gone are the current ways of communicating, using smartphones and texting and social media. People had to use corded telephones! Can you even imagine? Long distance calls were prohibitively expensive. And misogyny was rampant, accepted, normal even. So the way men treat Claudia is an assault to 21^st century ears. Her career was ruined because of an affair with a married politician – a politician whose own career wasn’t even slightly touched, except maybe to enhance it by association.

Brashear weaves in the real feel of how things were during that time – I think of 1968 as the beginning of a political and social revolution but in reality, while we have “come a long way, baby”, it didn’t happen overnight. (I would say, it hasn’t been fully realized yet!) Henry reluctantly joins a demeaning betting pool about Claudia in order to further his own career – a pool that pretty much sums up “boys will be boys”. That increased the tension level overall because you can’t really experience the 20^th century through the lens of 2022 without some level of raised eyebrows, surprise and a touch of disgust.

It goes without saying that the narration choice was excellent. Teddy Hamilton (swoon!) and Mackenzie Cartwright both bring incredible experience and talent to this story. It’s read in dual point-of-view, not duet, so that each of them takes on all the characters during the sections coming from each main character. There isn’t much levity or quirky humor in the story – it’s very dramatic – and the sex scenes come across as overly intense, which I felt was less due to the narrators and more to the actual prose and context. I found that a bit unappealing but YMMV. Both Hamilton and Cartwright use different pitches, accents and other tricks of the trade like breath and tone to differentiate all the various characters well, as I expected going in. All in all, the narration really enhanced the experience.

Try Right worked as a stand-alone, although I did go back to the blurbs for the earlier 2 books to see what I might have missed. It appears that these stories all occur in the same timeline, because book 1, Try Easy, features the elusive Keoni as the hero, so I need to pick that one up to find out “the rest of the story”.

PS: Chirp Audio has a $1.99 special for Try Right through February 13 2022!

Melinda