Be My Baby by Susan Andersen

Narrated by Annie Green

I first read Be My Baby, book 2 in the Baby series, in print several years ago, while on a Susan Andersen glom, and it is still my favorite Andersen. For one thing, it takes place in New Orleans (pre-Katrina). And Andersen pretty much nails the accents, Irish Channel and Yat, and how they ate and generally the mood of the city. She got the French Quarter pretty much right – especially Bourbon Street. Her characters were fun, even the villain(s) had me laughing. I mean, the Panty Snatcher, really! And as usual, her love scenes are hot.

The heroine is Juliet, a blue blood Bostonian, in New Orleans to open an exclusive hotel in what was formerly a Garden District mansion. Her family owns the hotel along with a string of other high class hotels, and this is her first chance to show what she can do in the family business. The hero is Beau Dupree, a Yat cop, assigned to be her body guard after she receives a threatening letter about the hotel. Ok, it’s more of a warning than a threat, from someone interested in keeping the mansion historically preserved and not made into a hotel. But her Daddy has some leverage because of his wealth, and the police department has a politically aware Acting Chief who makes Beau do it even though it seems ridiculous.

Beau had to raise his sisters after their parents’ deaths – this is a scenario I’ve seen before (SEP’s First Lady, anyone?) – so he’s had his fill of family life and is looking forward to some bachelor fantasy life that doesn’t include an uptight society Yankee. Juliet gets a whiff of life without Daddy and Grandmother telling her what to do, and loses some of her inhibitions, but still doesn’t fit the fantasies Beau has, or does she?

Beau spends some time trying to get Juliet to have him removed from the job – until someone shoots at her (or him?) and he decides it is a credible threat after all. Now he’s on her like white on rice. Well, once they’re living in each other’s pockets, what else can you expect to happen? Immediate attraction.

I laughed a lot during this book – she used some great lines that had me howling out loud – like Beau’s t-shirt with the slogan “Call 911 and Make a Cop Come”. There were lots of happily-ever-afters in this story, for Juliet and Beau, for Beau’s sisters and his partner, even for Juliet’s assistant – that was fun too.

I kept being reminded of my own grandmother when Juliet described hers – she corrected our pronunciations (elocution, anyone?) from “git” to “g-eh -t” and “pin” to “p-eh-n”, and tried to make us be ladies with better posture and manners. However, we were far from Boston Brahmin, so it didn’t have quite the same effect on me! All in all, this was a fun read – and I’ve read it several times over the years.

I was pretty pumped when Andersen’s Baby series was announced in audio format, but then a little dismayed that the publisher chose relatively unknown narrators. This was right at the crest of the big wave of romance titles coming to audio a few years ago, and it seemed as if, in the rush to fulfill the demand, experienced narrators must have been hard to come by*. I listened to this one when it was released 3 years ago, and didn’t even bother to rate it, much less write a review. I decided to take another stab at it this week and see if I could put into words how I felt about Annie Green’s narration of one of my favorite contemporary romances. First of all, she does a number of things right. She doesn’t give Juliet any particular accent (good) while she gives all the New Orleans’ characters differing amounts of accents (OK). Beau has a pronounced drawl, and it works for his character; the Haynes couple, New Orleans society, also have passable southern society type sounds, if a little thick. She does a fair Cajun accent when called for, so, on accents in general, B. Much of her dialogue is paced appropriately, as though people were actually talking to each other, and for that, I was grateful.

But her overall pacing and delivery is amateur, and it sounds much of the time as if she’s just reading aloud versus professionally narrating a story. It’s not as annoying as other (C level) narrators I have heard, but she regularly inserts awkward pauses and emphasizes the wrong word in sentences, as though she either had not read ahead or doesn’t really have a talent for book narration. If this only happened a handful of times, I could overlook it, but it was more the norm than the exception. And there were scattered mispronunciations throughout, and if these had been street names in New Orleans, it would make sense – not that many people outside of New Orleans know how NOLA residents say some of those! Early on she got the contraction “yat” correct – it rhymes with cat and is short for Where Ya At, and is a nickname for a type of personality in New Orleans – but towards the end, she pronounced it “yacht” which was ironic and just wrong.

She does differentiate between her characters (good) but doesn’t have much of a range in pitch. She uses other ways – mostly accents – to create the differences (OK). Overall, I wasn’t impressed with her narration. I listened to her again in January 2014 (Always on My Mind by Jill Shalvis) and had the same exact reaction. She did not ruin this book for me – it wasn’t quite that bad – but I think my future visits to this story will be on my iPad/Kindle instead.

*The cynical Cranky Listener thinks this decision was less about lack of available professional narrators and more about publishers looking to make more money by cutting out the talent. But that’s just one opinion.

Melinda

Narration: C+

Book Content: A

Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in

Violence Rating: Minimal

Genre: Contemporary Romance

Publisher: Audible Studios