Narrated by Victoria Aston
No Earls Allowed is the second book in Shana Galen’s Survivors series about a group of former soldiers who were members of a specially formed suicide squad during the Napoleonic Wars. Of the thirty members, only twelve returned, something that continues to haunt the unit’s commander Major Neil Wraxall, illegitimate son of the Marquess of Kensington, who also lost his younger half-brother during the conflict. Now the war is over, he spends most of his time at his club with his closest friends, Ewan Mostyn (Third Son’s a Charm) and Rafe Beaumont, or alone, wallowing in guilt and consuming large quantities of alcohol in order to keep the nightmares at bay.
Lady Juliana (Julia), daughter of the Earl of St. Maur, has been struggling to make sense of her life since the death of her beloved sister, Harriett. One of the charities the sisters supported was a home for orphaned boys which Julia optimistically renamed “The Sunnybrook Home for Boys”; and since Harriett’s death in childbirth, her work there has become something of an emotional crutch for Julia, who sees devoting herself to the care of the twelve boys in residence as a way of keeping Harriet’s memory alive. Her father is worried about her and wants her to return home, but Julia is adamant – the boys need her, and having seen the way Harriett’s husband treated her, Julia has no interest in men or marriage, so returning to the usual round of balls and parties of the marriage mart is pointless.
On one particularly difficult morning that has so far encompassed the resignation of the cook and a trio of escaped rats – Julia is both surprised and relieved to receive a visit from the most startlingly handsome man she’s ever seen. He arrives just in time to deter her other guest – an obnoxious man by the name of Slag – from continuing to importune her for a large sum of money that she is expected to pay for “protection”. The dark-haired, blue-eyed, olive-skinned Adonis introduces himself as Neil Wraxall and explains that his father has asked him, on behalf of her father, to come to the orphanage to make sure she is well.
Julia is suspicious – her father has obviously sent Wraxall to bring her home – but Neil is no fool and sees immediately that short of carrying her out of there, Julia will not be easily dislodged. He also realises that the building is in a really bad state of repair and decides that the next best thing – for now – to getting Julia home will be to make sure she is as safe as possible. He sets about making an assessment of what needs to be done – repairs to the roof, new locks on the windows and doors, reliable servants engaged – although even when that’s all done, he knows she isn’t going to meekly obey her father’s summons and go back to her old life. And having discovered that one of her servants is working for Slag, there’s no question of Neil’s leaving until Julia does; if she stays, then so does he.
I’ll admit right out of the gate that the premise does require a fairly large suspension of disbelief – the idea of an earl’s daughter running and residing in a dilapidated boy’s home in the East End is a tough one to swallow, although to be fair, Ms. Galen does give Julia a deeper reason for doing what she is doing than simply presenting her as a naïve do-gooder dispensing largesse. I liked Julia for the most part – she’s determined, she’s gutsy and she’s not afraid to ask for help, although near the end she turned into my least favourite heroine-type when she insisted on accompanying Neil into a dangerous situation in spite of the fact he told her that worrying about her safety would be a distraction – and then ended up needing to be rescued. *sigh*
Neil is a great hero – kind, honourable and downright decent (as well as indecently gorgeous) – although even he has his moment of stupidity before all’s said and done – and some of the best moments in the story are his interactions with the boys at the home. I’m not normally a fan of children in romances, but they’re well-drawn here, and Ms. Galen does a good job of showing how they bond with Neil and start to look up to him as a father figure, and how he so naturally steps into that role, his experience as a leader of men standing him in good stead when it comes to a bunch of unruly boys who badly need boundaries and a sense of security. Neil is also a hero who is a little different from the norm in that he is so determined never to subject an innocent child to the stain of illegitimacy that he has remained a virgin (albeit of the “I’m a virgin, not a monk” variety!).
The romance between Neil and Julia develops quite quickly – over just a few days – and while their enforced proximity and the heightened tension of their circumstances mean that it doesn’t feel too rushed, I nonetheless didn’t feel there was a great deal of chemistry between the couple, which I suspect has a lot to do with the narrator’s portrayal of the hero. I read the e-book version of this novel a couple of months back and in my review noted the strong chemistry between Neil and Julia, but that’s largely absent in the audio.
Victoria Aston is a new-to-me-narrator, although I’m sure I’ve heard her before under another name. If she’s who I think she is, she’s an experienced narrator with more than seventy audiobooks under her belt in a variety of genres. On the whole her performance is a good one, and, if not for one (rather large) flaw, I’d have been rating it quite highly. Her pacing is good in narrative and dialogue, her diction is clear, and her voice is well-modulated and pleasant to listen to. She differentiates clearly between characters, her portrayal of the various boys in the story – who range from four to twelve in age – is extremely well done and she does a good job with the cockney/London accents for them and for characters like Slag and various other bit-parts. The big let-down, though, is her male voices. While there is no difficulty in distinguishing between Neil and other characters, Ms. Aston pitches him in the same register as Julia and although the softly spoken, slightly deliberate manner of speech she adopts works well to paint him as the sort of man who is used to being obeyed and never needs to raise his voice, the teasing banter I enjoyed in print fell rather flat and try as I might, I just couldn’t picture a sexy romantic hero. And although he’s distinguishable from other characters, a few times, I was unable to distinguish between his speech and narrative. I also noted a couple of pronunciation errors; for some reason Ms. Aston pronounces “collect” as “clect” and “polite” as “plite”, and there were a few times when I was quite conscious of audible breath sounds – which isn’t something that normally bothers me over much, but which I know drives some listeners batty.
No Earls Allowed is well-written and the characters are engaging, even if the premise is a little hard to take. While flawed, the narration is by no means horrible, and if you’re a fan of the author’s or of the sort of “historical-lite” romance penned by authors such as Tessa Dare and Maya Rodale, you might well enjoy it.
Buy No Earls Allowed by Shana Galen on Amazon
