Legacy by Nora Roberts

Narrated by January LaVoy

Legacy is Nora Roberts’ 2021 release which has been languishing on my TBR until now. While I think it is not close to her best work, it certainly held my interest. The romance side of things is very slow to start and not at all the main focus of the book.

Adrian Rizzo was 7 years old when her father tried to kill her. She had been raised by a single mother; her biological father was a college professor who couldn’t keep it in his pants, had a problem with alcohol and was violent when he didn’t get his way. Somehow a reporter found out about Adrian’s existence which led to the professor’s downfall and definitely makes him (and his wife!) unhappy. So, dear old dad pays Adrian’s mother a visit and does violence to all in the house. As much damage as he causes, he does not survive the experience.

Adrian’s mother started “Yoga Baby”, fitness and workout classes, videos and merchandise. By age 16, Adrian wants to start her own version of the business and over the next few years, becomes very successful. Around the time she first found success with “Next Generation” she started getting poems containing death threats – one a year at first.

Adrian ends up moving to a small town where her grandparents are and settling in. She’s not like her mother who enjoys constant travel. Adrian wants to put down roots. She prefers to have a streaming type service for her workouts but does videos with her mother regularly too.

There’s a lot of family stuff. Roberts writes engaging characters so it was entertaining enough, particularly with excellent narration from January LaVoy.

Adrian’s eventual love interest is Raylan Wells. But Raylan has a tragedy of his own to live through first. (I’d heard about this from a friend when the book first came out and it was a reason I delayed starting Legacy.)

The threats to Adrian are escalating and eventually Adrian’s mother puts a private investigator on the case. She has more time than the police or FBI and she starts to make headway. She also finds out that “the poet” has killed multiple women in the years since he or she first started sending verses to Adrian. The threat to Adrian is very real.

The fitness and wellness aspects of the book were the least interesting for me. A little too much information and I felt uncomfortable with some of the messaging around the topic which I felt was fatphobic.

There were multiple instances where a character I came to care about died and I cried when I got to those bits.

The romance between Adrian and Raylan doesn’t even get started until 2/3 into the book and it’s fairly thinly developed. I prefer Roberts’ standalones which have more developed romance.

There were some other parts of the book which were a bit light on – for instance, Adrian is described as having a lifelong friendship with a character by the name of Lorilee but there’s almost nothing more about it in the book.

However, January LaVoy is always a pleasure to listen to and she elevated the story with her performance. As the title suggests, the characters in Legacy are multigenerational – Ms. LaVoy had the opportunity to showcase her wide variety of voices – multiple children, teens, adults and the elderly – all genders and all different. Just fantastic.

Of course, her tone and emotion was also wonderful, as I’ve come to expect.

While Legacy wasn’t my favourite, the narration alone made it worthwhile.

Kaetrin

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Buy Legacy by Nora Roberts on Amazon