To Catch a Fallen Leaf by Fearne Hill

Narrated by Richard Stranks

To Catch a Fallen Leaf is book two in Fearne Hill’s Rossingley series, and while it probably isn’t essential to have listened to the first book (To Hold a Hidden Pearl) I’d certainly recommend it – the narration by Richard Stranks is excellent and its main protagonist, Lucien Avery, sixteenth Earl of Rossingley, is a fascinating and unique character who is the beating heart of the series.

In this story, we meet Lucien’s cousin Freddie – properly Aloysius Frederick Lloyd Duchamps-Avery – a top-flight male model, who was arrested for possession of an illegal substance and public vagrancy after a drunken, coke-fuelled binge left him slumped over on the pavement outside Macy’s in New York. The brewing scandal has his father  – who, as Home Secretary, is known to take a particularly hard stance on drugs and crime – coming down on him like a ton of bricks, far more concerned with preserving his career than with his son’s well-being, so Freddie takes up Lucien’s invitation to lie low at Rossingley for a while until things blow over. 

Freddie and Lucien are close. Freddie feels Lucien is the only person who’s given a damn about him since his mother died when Freddie was twelve, and Lucien places great store by family, especially since the tragic deaths of his parents and his older brother some years earlier. Freddie looks forward to a pleasantly relaxing (bordering on lazy) stay, but that isn’t quite what Lucien has in mind. He thinks Freddie will soon become bored out of his mind with nothing to do and, in typical Lucien fashion, ‘suggests’ (i.e, tells him) he should work with the estate groundskeepers because the fresh air and exercise will do him good.

Frenchman Reuben Costaud has been a gardener at Rossingley for just over a year, and he’s very happy there. He loves his job, his little cottage, his cat, and the guys he works with, a motley bunch who tease each other mercilessly. The oldest of them, an enigmatic gent nicknamed ‘Gandalf’ (for his long grey hair and beard) is coaching Reuben for his English GCSE exam and regularly grills him about grammar and poetry during their tea breaks. Reuben came to England after his release from a decade in prison – we don’t find out why he was inside until later in the story – and he’s planning to enrol in Agricultural College with a view to, hopefully one day, taking over as Head Gardener at the estate.

Reuben is adorable. He’s sweet and kind and takes the good-natured ribbing of his workmates in his stride, and, for the first time in his life, feels he’s somewhere he properly belongs. He’s instantly smitten with the gorgeous Freddie, but thinks the other man is way out of his league – while Freddie is completely charmed by Reuben’s guileless unaffectedness – so different to most of the men he meets – and offers to help him with the other subjects he’s studying. It’s true that Freddie is looking for a reason to spend more time with Reuben, but he genuinely wants to help – and besides, it’s not often he gets to use his history degree; he’s spent most of his adult life being viewed as little more than a pretty face so it’s good to get to use his mind for a change.

They make a cute couple and I really enjoyed their getting-to-know-you phase as they spend time together and become friends. I liked their friendship a lot; Freddie is so supportive of Reuben and his sincere admiration for Reuben’s desire to do better is just lovely. The attraction they’re feeling for one another is nicely articulated, but the leap from friends to lovers seems to just ‘happen’ with little in between. This is a relatively angst-free story, and although there are some darker notes to it, they don’t quite fit the overall tone. Reuben clearly has lingering issues from his time in prison but they’re mostly glossed over, and I admit that I found it difficult to believe he could have spent ten years behind bars and not have come out with some harder edges. 

And then there’s the third-act Big Mis, which feels contrived and relies on Reuben jumping to conclusions with no real evidence – although this does lead to a fantastic scene between him and his workmates that shows just how protective of him they are. The timeline feels off, too – I couldn’t work out how the person responsible for stirring things up got to Rossingley to shoot his mouth off before Freddie got there.

Thing is, despite those reservations, I enjoyed the story. Freddie and Reuben are perhaps not the most complex of characters and their romance could have used a little more development, but Fearne Hill has a real gift for writing genuinely funny and insightful dialogue and for writing wonderful male friendships, and she generally creates interesting characters with real depth to them who are likeable and easy to root for. This was actually the first book of hers I ever read in print, and while I don’t count it as a personal favourite, she’s since become one of my handful of must-read authors.

Richard Stranks returns to narrate this second Rossingleybook, and I enjoyed his performance very much. His pacing is good, his enunciation is clear and his voice, which I’d describe as in the tenor range (so higher pitched than most male romance narrators I listen to) is pleasant to listen to. He reads Reuben’s narrative using his ‘regular’ English accent and adopts a (very good) French accent for Reuben’s (English) dialogue, and the French words and phrases that are dropped in here and there are correctly pronounced, too. His portrayal of Lucien and Jay sound as I remember them from the previous book – Lucien is such a scene stealer! – and his interpretation of Freddie is nicely done. He doesn’t have a very wide range, pitch wise, for his character voices, but he differentiates clearly by means of tone and accent, although there are a couple of times Lucien and Freddie sound too alike. My one big criticism overall is with his pronunciation of Aloysius, which varies throughout. It’s not pronounced as it’s spelled – the normal pronunciation is “a-loo-ish-us” or “a-low-ish-us”,  but for some reason, Mr. Stranks switches between the two. He gets it right about half the time, so he obviously knows how to pronounce it – which kind of makes it worse when he gets it wrong. I can’t believe it wasn’t picked up and fixed in post-production. 

That apart, however, it’s a strong performance that went quite a way towards enhancing my enjoyment of the story, and I hope Richard Stranks stays on if the other books are to make their way into audio. To Catch a Fallen Leaf isn’t the strongest entry in the Rossingley series, but the likeable characters, the humour, the strength of the relationships (friendship and familial) and the enjoyable narration earn it a recommendation.

Caz

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