Boy Toy by Sarina Bowen and Tanya Eby

Narrated by Teddy Hamilton and Tanya Eby

The story opens with Sadie Matthews, a single mom, taking her twin toddlers to daycare for the very first time, where she meets the child development specialist Liam McAllister. Liam, whom she immediately recognizes as one of the children she babysat 15 years ago. Liam, who is now 6’3” of hunky, fully adult man. Sigh!

Liam has had a crush on Sadie since he was a pimply faced 14 year old (this part made me envision the movie Adventures in Babysitting, which is one of my favorite movies of all time). Like the older boy in Babysitting, Liam had younger siblings that Sadie was really there to watch. And although the age difference was about 6 years – now that they’re adults, 6 years difference isn’t really that big a deal to him, or to me, but Sadie can’t seem to get past it.

The writing duo of Bowen and Eby has a very unique style of what they refer to (accurately!) as snort-laughter humor, with realistic situations and emotions, and pretty steamy love scenes. Boy Toy is their third book in a loosely-related series, and the previous characters make cameo appearances since the 3 women are best friends (see Man Hands). But the story works well as a stand-alone too. I found Sadie to be a little irritating, though, with her over-wrought angst at leaving the kids at daycare and her leaning-to-helicopter parenting style, even though both were opportunities for a few of those snort-laughs. She was able to get past the age issue pretty early on, just enough to go ahead and have bed-rocking, sweaty sex with Liam, but she clung to the “it’s just sex with a younger man” conflict a few minutes past its expiration. And for all the enjoyment I got from a humorous rom-com romp, Liam was maybe a teeny bit sappy from time to time.

However, since it was my narrator-crush Teddy Hamilton reading Liam in first person, I forgave all. Hamilton has this earnest boyishness in his delivery that makes me sigh and smile pretty much the whole time. Thinking back, all his voices, including the toddlers, are good. His Sadie voice has just a slight bit higher pitch, so there is good differentiation between characters. In first person narratives, though, I don’t place quite the same value on differences since I hear it as the character speaking the entire time. Tanya Eby is an experienced romance narrator whose performances I’ve enjoyed for years, as well as one of the authors. She doesn’t narrate the other two books in the series, but I think this was a good choice for both narrators, since my impression of Eby’s voice is that of a mid-30s, midwestern, no-nonsense woman, which worked well for Sadie and contrasted nicely with the earnest, boyish voice of Liam by Hamilton. And by boyish, I don’t mean immature or cradle-robbingly-young, but eager and likeable. Very, very likeable indeed!

All in all, I enjoyed the experience, the story and the narration and found it to be an entertaining listen for a summer weekend!

Melinda