Fading by E. K. Blair

Narrated by Piper Goodeve

Once I finish a book, I’m usually pretty certain how I feel about it. I can tell you if I loved it or hated it, and I can always tell you why. This is not the case with Fading. This intensely powerful and moving story has left me conflicted.

Candace Parker is twenty-two, and a senior in college. As an aspiring ballerina, she doesn’t have a lot of time for the normal kinds of college fun. Instead, she focuses on schoolwork and dancing. Her friends urge her to loosen up, and, even though she doesn’t feel entirely comfortable with the idea, she gives in.

Candace has a difficult relationship with her parents who are overly conscious of their social status. She fears that she will never be good enough for them. In an attempt to please them, she agrees to date a man whose parents are long time friends of her mother’s. At first, Jack is charming, but Candace knows they have nothing in common. He’s not someone she wants to get serious with. She tries not to lead him on, but, one evening, he gets drunk and rapes her.

The assault changes Candace in every way imaginable. She doesn’t know who she is anymore. She wants to forget it ever happened, but she’s constantly afraid Jack will walk in the door of the coffee shop where she works. She fears running into him on campus, and her nights are plagued with dreams of the rape. Even her dancing is affected. It’s the one thing she can do without thinking of Jack, but this leads to technically perfect performances that lack feeling.

One night, Candace is introduced to Ryan Campbell, the owner of a local bar. She’s run into him a few times at work, but they haven’t really spoken. Candace is nervous about getting close to him, but, as they begin to spend more time together, she calms down, and allows herself to fall for him.

There were some positive aspects to Piper Goodeve’s narration of Fading. However, character differentiation was not one of them. It’s told in first person, from Candace’s point of view. Ms. Goodeve uses her normal voice when speaking for Candace. Not much changes when other female characters who are close in age to Candace are being portrayed. Her roommate Kimber is given a sort of valley girl sound, but no one else really stands out. This made me almost completely reliant on context and dialogue tags.

I thought her depictions of both Candace and Ryan’s mothers were spot on. Candace’s mother sounded incredibly pretentious, hostile, and self-involved. This meshed perfectly with the text. Ryan’s mother is open, warm, and supportive. Her love for her family was impossible to miss.

There was very little variation in Ms. Goodeve’s depiction of the various male characters. She uses a lower pitch, but not much else changes. Ryan and Candace’s friend Jace sound almost exactly alike, even though Jace is twenty-two, gay, and a heavy drinker, while Ryan is twenty-eight, heterosexual, and not overly interested in partying. These characters are written in such a way as to make them totally distinguishable from one another. Unfortunately, Ms. Goodeve was not able to make this happen.

On the upside, she really allowed me to get inside Candace’s head. I could practically feel all the fear, pain, and joy the character felt. Candace seemed more like a real person than a written character, and I appreciate any narrator who can bring a character to life in such a way. I also found Candace’s interactions with Ryan to be very believable. I could definitely tell that these two were meant to be together.

I must also add that the prologue, which is told from Ryan’s point of view, was narrated by a man whose name is not revealed in the credits. I found this disconcerting, but, whoever he was, he read the prologue well. Perhaps he’ll be the narrator of the book that tells this story from Ryan’s POV (or perhaps he is Angelo Carillo who narrates Freeing and Falling with Ms. Goodeve).

Fading is a very intense book. It’s character, rather than plot, driven so, you won’t see a lot of action. Candace’s assault, and the way she deals with it take up a large amount of the book, and Ms. Blair deals with this topic with sensitivity and grace. Rape is a big deal, and she doesn’t put any other spin on it. She writes very realistically about the problems a sexual assault survivor might experience.

I think Fading could have benefited from a really good editor. The writing was sometimes awkward. Even though the story itself is beautiful, the lack of good sentence structure sometimes made it difficult to follow.

I was irked by the fact that the author thought it was okay for Candace’s roommate to tease her by calling her a slut and a hooker. In a book that focuses so intensely on the effects of sexual assault, this seemed inappropriate. I was also a little taken aback by the amount of physical affection Candace shares with her male friends. It’s not uncommon for her to spend nights in the same bed with Jace, and, even before she and Ryan became a couple, they slept together. Do real people behave that way?

If you aren’t in the mood for something really intense, skip Fading until such a mood comes along. I don’t regret listening to it, despite my conflicted opinions on the writing and the behavior of the characters. It’s a story that needed to be told, and it will definitely stay with me for a long time to come.

Shannon

Narration:  C-

Book Content:  B

Steam Factor:  Glad I had my earbuds in

Violence:  Fighting, domestic (a very vivid description of Candace’s assault)

Genre:  Contemporary Romance

Publisher:  Audible, Inc.

Fading was provided to AudioGals by Audible, Inc. for review.