Child of Mine by Karen Grey

Narrated by Erin Mallon and Tom Taylorson

Isabelle York was a TV star – first as “Izzy”, the ever-optimistic 13-year-old on the children’s show Boom – and then a soap opera star – “Quinn” the hedonistic bad girl, a persona she took on both on screen and in real life. And then a one-night-stand during a party, with a fan, preceded her departure from TV. Now she’s living with her mom while raising her own daughter, and she goes by Bella. A chance to revisit her past by working as an associate producer on a reboot of Boom comes just at the right time: the income from her mother’s bookstore is dwindling and they need the cash, since Bella’s father absconded with her TV earnings years ago.

Henry Smith – the aforementioned fan – is also in the TV business. He met his dream girl a few years back, right before his life imploded, and he never saw her again – until he gets a job on a children’s TV show: Boom. What Henry doesn’t know is that he’s the father of Bella’s little girl Lilah, and then he meets her and sees his sister’s face in her.

Author Grey has set her Boston Classics series in the 1980s – a period I like to consider “vintage Romance” vs historical, since I was already an adult during this decade! She captures the essence of the whole pre-internet era, with corded phones instead of mobile phones, gossip rags instead of social media, and in Child of Mine, the dark shadow of the HIV/AIDS crisis plays a minor role, evoking all the feelings of the time. When Henry disappears after their off-the-charts attraction sparked a one-night-stand, she has no way to contact him to let him know – Lilah isn’t really a “secret baby”, she just doesn’t know who or where the father is. However, once they meet again, she just never can find the right time to tell him – even with her angel (“Izzy”) and her devil (“Quinn”) sitting on her shoulders and giving her their opinions on the matter. Plus there’s the little matter of her checkered past…

But the spark that brought them together is still strong. Once he makes the connection, Henry is determined to be there for his daughter, and also for Bella if she’ll have him.

This story hits several favorite themes – the grumpy hero/sunshiny heroine (and daughter!), the second-chance romance, the secret baby – and there are a lot of other secrets to uncover as well. When the show, Boom, receives an anonymous threat targeting Bella’s past, the couple has to face some potentially damaging truths. The bond that forms between Henry and his daughter Lilah is done so well – Henry has to overcome his own perception that children don’t like him and find ways to relate to this smart but wary little girl. It was endearing to watch their relationship form and bloom. Oh, Notable Pet bonus: Ribsy, Henry’s dog!

The narration is done by Erin Mallon and Tom Taylorson. Mallon has a lot of experience with Romance narrations and is reliably good. In this book, however, both she and Taylorson seemed to be talking too fast – I looked twice to see if I’d accidentally increased the speed on the app. Because of the speed, I felt her reading lacked nuance and her character differentiation wasn’t always strong enough to distinguish characters of the same gender, so that only context and author cues made it clear who was speaking. Taylorson is new to me. He took advantage of the hero’s home state accent (North Carolina) to portray Henry and in general did a better job of voicing all the different speakers. A fun part of the listen was snippets of entertainment news shorts, with the sound of typewriters in the background, bringing us the gossip of the day to open each chapter.

In all, I ended up enjoying the trip back to the 1980s, with the journey of Henry, Bella and Lilah – and Ribsy!

Melinda