Narrated by Stina Nielsen
I am a sucker for a book with dogs, so a book set in and around a rescue shelter was right up my alley. Sit, Stay, Love has many dogs – more than 37 in fact.
Kelsey Sutton works at the Highgrove Rescue Shelter in St. Louis. When the book begins, a dog fighting ring has been busted and there are a large number of dogs in need of rehab. The shelter agrees to take 37 dogs and house them in a mansion willed to them by a benefactor, Sabrina Raven.
Kurt Crawford was a dog handler in the Marines. He has recently been discharged and is looking for his next thing. Bruised and beaten by losing a number of beloved dogs to IEDs and the war in Afghanistan, not to mention human friends as well, he has sworn off working with dogs again. But, when his mentor asks him to help rehab the dogs rescued from the fighting ring, he finds himself taking a look, just because. There he meets Kelsey and something draws him to her.
It isn’t long before both Kelsey and Kurt are working together at the Sabrina Raven estate to heal the various emotional wounds of the dogs and rehab/socialise them so they can be adopted to good and loving homes.
Kurt, to his surprise, feels a powerful sense of homecoming at the house left to the shelter. And something about Kelsey feels like home to him too.
Kelsey had a backstory which had me scratching my head a little. She’s 27 but hasn’t had many relationships. The only time she had sex was with a guy she loved but with whom she didn’t actually date. They were friends for a couple of years in college and then one night they had sex but the next morning he wasn’t into her anymore and she was crushed. She subsequently developed depression (and I didn’t judge her for that or for leaving college as a result). But I didn’t quite understand why her “relationship” with Steve had caused her such scars. And, I didn’t understand why she had so little relationship experience at all. Neither of these things were important to the story so it felt a little unnecessary to say the least.
I did enjoy the growing attraction between Kurt and Kelsey and I loved all the stuff about the dogs. The relationship between the two humans was fairly low-conflict. There wasn’t really anything keeping them apart; it was more the slow build to their HEA rather than overcoming obstacles. Kurt does have to lay to rest some old ghosts but that is as much his personal journey as anything else.
While there is on-page sex, the scenes are not very explicit at all, mostly skipping ahead to the after and only briefly touching on the “during”. That’s fine – it suited the book and I didn’t particularly feel the lack of more detailed lovemaking. There was plenty of intimacy as Kurt and Kelsey worked together. Kurt spends most of the book not being very open about his feelings and it is only very late in the piece where he begins to open up but the listener gets to hear his thoughts and knows he is gone over Kelsey very early. In addition, there is an easy camaraderie between the two which felt intimate even if they were not always having deep and meaningful conversations.
Kurt has ADHD and this is part of his story. I’m not familiar enough with ADHD to know whether the representation was a good one. Kurt was described as being a terror as a child, being unable to sit still now, unless he’s working with the dogs and not good at making or sticking to to-do lists. I did like that Kurt’s disability wasn’t treated as a terrible thing that Kelsey had to get past. It didn’t faze her much – it was just another thing about him, like his hair colour or the way he handled dogs or his handy way with a hammer.
There is possibly a hint of the paranormal in the story – or a kind of magical realism at least, as Kurt seems to be getting messages from his nana from beyond the grave. It added a whimsical touch to the book and gave it something of a fairy-tale air.
Sit, Stay, Love was my first Stina Nielsen narration. I liked her voice in general; it was pleasing to the ear and she had good emotion and pacing. Her male character voices weren’t the best, however. While there was a vocal difference between the female and male cast members, the men didn’t have much depth/bass to their voices at all. I could tell who was talking but it wasn’t quite enough for me to really believe.
I’m not sure if it was an issue with my iPod or not, but there were a couple of occasions where I couldn’t make out a word in the story. It wasn’t that there was an issue with the narration per se, it felt more like the recording skipped a half a second (or less) and it made a word unclear here and there.
For all that Ms. Nielsen’s male character voices didn’t impress me much, I did otherwise enjoy the listen. She was well able to deliver the emotion of newborn puppies and troubled dogs and playful corgis, all wrapped up in a developing romance between Kurt and Kelsey. I just wish Kurt’s voice had been a little more authentically male.
Kaetrin
Buy Sit, Stay, Love by Debbie Burns on Amazon
