Cake by J. Bengtsson

Narrated by Andi Arndt and Joe Arden

Casey Caldwell is a gregarious accounting student and a bridesmaid at her best friend’s wedding – a best friend who is marrying the half brother of the famous rock star Jake McKallister, the groomsman assigned as Casey’s wedding partner. Jake is a sort of surly loner when he’s not on stage, pretty much the complete opposite of Casey – what could they possibly have in common?

Jake has spent the last 7 years on the road, away from his family, touring with his rock band ever since he composed and performed his first hit as a teenager. But Jake has another reason for being so famous – at age 13, he was kidnapped and tortured for 36 days before he killed the abductor, an ordeal he has learned to live with but has never fully shared with anyone. His music, something in which he had excelled as a child, saved him and allowed him to forget, even if just for a few hours, while performing. But he has one reminder – a crushed knee that has undergone several surgeries and still causes him physical pain. The other reminder is the media – since he never publicly revealed the details, he was crucified in the press, after he escaped, as a violent murderer.

At his brother’s wedding, he has two personas – the warm, smiling Jake when surrounded by family, and the cool, detached Jake with anyone else. Casey finds it her mission to crack the ice and experience what he obviously has hidden deep inside.

Cake is the name Casey jokingly uses as their Hollywood couple name (like Brangelina) – this might have been the very chisel that chipped away the first big chunk of Jake’s frozen exterior, as he finally started noticing Casey and allowing her inside his inner circle. Casey was a likeable heroine – very firmly rooted in her reality, with a supportive family and the goal to complete her college education. She didn’t fool herself into thinking that Jake was going to “save” her or whisk her away on his shining white steed, but she also didn’t display that annoying trope of being too stubborn to let him help – when he asks her to join him on tour for a weekend in London, although she asked him not to buy her first class tickets, she still jumped at the opportunity and allowed him to pay for everything (and of course, it was first class despite her objections – he’s a rock star!). And although there was the angst of Jake’s kidnapping hanging over their heads, it was very genuinely written without over-dramatizing it – a sort of Cinderella story, where Prince Charming also had some growing up and a lot of healing to do.

Andi Arndt is a true professional and really shines with these sort of New Adult*, first person POV narrations. Her own voice is a neutral young age (could identify as 20s-30s, easily) but she focuses convincingly into the character, in this case age 23, without making the character sound too young or too old. She has a good range of pitches for the various other characters, both male and female, and gives each one the appropriate tone/timbre to make it easy to tell who is speaking (it’s good acting as well, which enhances the audio experience). Her pacing is completely in character and natural, letting Casey’s personality tell the story. Joe Arden is also very good with these kinds of books, although his voice seems a little older/rougher, which worked well enough for Jake even if he was also 23. I actually prefer a mature sounding narrator voice – as I noted in my review of Roommates, I don’t really want immature/high school age voices for adults, even if they’re only in their early 20s. My one wince (and it happened a lot, so there was a fair amount of wincing) wasn’t the narrators’ fault – the author has Jake refer to Casey as a “girl” throughout. Even if she’s still in college, my feminist self wants to hear females over about 17 referred to as women – something about using “girl” was sort of creepy, especially in the bedroom, and especially with a more mature male voice speaking.

Overall, I enjoyed this listen – nothing groundbreaking, just a love story – and in spite of his being a “rock star” (not sure what his rock genre was – pop? punk? progressive?), there wasn’t any drug use or violence, except in the descriptions of his kidnapping. I’ll let that stand as a guide to whether someone else will find it to their taste or not.

*ok, I guess I need to call this New Adult instead of “sort of” since both protagonists are 23, but I have a personal prejudice against the concept of “New Adult” as a label, possibly because my experience has been that New Adult books are overly angsty, eye-rollingly so. Although I did have one or two eye-rolling moments in this book, the inner conflicts and exterior pressures were realistically enough drawn.

[section label=’Audiobook Information’ anchor=’Audiobook Information’]

Melinda

AUDIOBOOK INFORMATION

TITLE: Cake

AUTHOR: J. Bengtsson

NARRATED BY: Joe Arden and Andi Arndt

GENRE: Contemporary Romance

STEAM FACTOR: Glad I had my earbuds in

REVIEWER: Melinda [button type=”link” link=”http://www.amazon.com/dp/ASINHERE/?tag=audiogalsnet-20″ size=”btn-lg” variation=”btn-default” target=”blank”]Buy Cake by J. Bengtsson on Amazon[/button]