Baby, Don’t Go by Stephanie Bond

Narrated by Cassandra Campbell

A Vintage Review from 2011

Baby, Don’t Go is book 3 in the Southern Roads Trilogy, and between the author and narrator Cassandra Campbell, they make it work pretty doggone well. Although fairly new to me in 2011 (she was also the narrator who read the third person POV in Kathryn Stockett’s The Help), Campbell has a large library of narrations in her bio – in addition to the Southern Roads Trilogy and The Help, she has done over 100 audiobooks (update 2018: make that hundreds), including non-fiction works as well as other fiction genres.

Heroine Alicia Randall is the Undercover Feminist, writing a column for the ultra-radical Feminine Power magazine out of New York City, always looking to right any discrimination against women. She’s headed undercover to the town of Sweetness, Georgia, to expose obvious chauvinism: the town’s mostly-male residents put an ad in a Michigan newspaper looking for women to move to Sweetness.

Hero Marcus Armstrong is too busy rebuilding Sweetness to pay attention to the women who answered the town’s ad – in fact, he’s finding them to be a nuisance in his plan to get the town ready for the federal inspectors. In a case of opposites attract, the misogynistic Marcus Armstrong takes on the uber-feminist Alicia! But it’s not just man vs woman – it’s also small town vs NYC and South vs North, getting as much mileage out of every possible cliché ever conceived.

Campbell uses subtle accents for the Southerners in general and her narration is easy to listen to. She handles the author’s implausible scenarios and almost-over-the-top characters, reading just enough humor into them to make you smile. There are a number of different characters with varying accents, and Campbell keeps them all distinct and clear. One interesting observation for those of us who are Susan Elizabeth Phillips/Anna Fields fans – Campbell channels her inner Anna for one of the characters who sounds exactly like Charmaine, wife of Chicago Star Darnell Pruitt!

It’s a nice romantic comedy break, and it’s in the Audible Romance Package.

Melinda