Narrated by Erik Bloomquist & Madeleine Dauer
I bought the ebook of Anton based solely on the gorgeous cover – yes, I’m that shallow. In my defence, it was the best cover I’ve seen for ages. (Sadly, the current cover is a cut down version so my recommendation is to check out the original on Goodreads. Seriously, do it. I’ll wait. Also, the audiobook cover is different again and not a patch on the original ebook cover. It’s okay. I have a good memory.) Anyway, as it so often the case with books I buy, I haven’t had time to read it yet so I was pretty happy to sign up to review the audiobook.
Anton Petrov is the captain of the Chicago Blaze hockey team. He’s had it bad for the wife of a teammate for nearly three years. He’s never acted on it because she is married but it has led to him being celibate for a long time and not even attempting to date anyone else.
Mia Brown is married to Adam Marceau but has been separated from him for about eight months. Adam is a serial cheater and abusive to Mia. Listeners, please note there is some sexual coercion, emotional abuse and physical violence towards Mia from Adam during the course of the book. Adam is a very bad guy. While I’m here, I’ll also say Mia is infertile and this is something which is a conflict, at least for Mia, throughout the book.
When Anton realises that Mia is separated from Adam, he steps up to become Mia’s friend. She has virtually no-one and Adam has frozen her out of the joint bank accounts and refuses to give her a divorce unless she agrees to leave the marriage with nothing. Mia would do this but she is paying a crapton of money every month for nursing home care for her beloved grandfather (she was raised by her grandparents) who has Alzheimer’s Disease. Mia can’t afford a lawyer however so she lives in a kind of limbo, coerced to perform sex acts for Adam to get the money to pay for the nursing care her grandfather needs. In the meantime, she works at a bar and is studying to finish college. She had dropped out when she met and married Adam and is picking her life up again.
Anton and his fraternal twin brother Alexei were sent to the USA from Russia when they were only five years old (FIVE. My heart!) and have been living in America ever since, fostered by a hockey coach (and his wife) who trained them both from an early age. Anton considers the coach to be family too and has been looking after “Uncle Dix” for some months because reasons. Uncle Dix is a cantankerous old man who needs care but resents it. He is also rude, obnoxious and mean and he keeps chasing off the nursing help that Anton hires to be with him when Anton is away playing or training.
Mia has experience with eldercare and eventually, Anton hires her to “eldersit” with Uncle Dix. This provides care for Dix and Mia with money (Anton pays her very well) and they get to spend some time together so Yahtzee!
Mia is a bit shy of relationships after the disaster that has been her marriage and, in any event, even though Adam never respected their marriage vows, she does. And Anton is not a cheater either. So they agree from the start that whatever their feelings might be they will not act on them until Mia gets a divorce and Mia is ready. Anton makes it clear he is willing to wait as long as it takes.
Technically I guess they have an emotional affair but it never bothered me because Mia and Adam’s marriage was long over before anything remotely romantic happened between her and Anton. They don’t so much as kiss until the divorce is final however. I guess that serves to ramp up the sexual tension but it also means that they get to know one another well before anything happens.
Anton is a paragon of men – he has a reputation as eating cleanly, not drinking alcohol and being celibate – the first two are because he wants to keep playing hockey as long as he can and the second is because he’s got it bad for Mia. But he is also a really good guy. He’s respectful, generous, kind, loving and sweet – basically, everything Adam is not.
In some ways the story falls in to the id reading (listening) category, with fairly broad characterisations and stark differences between the good guy and the bad guy but I’m not complaining. I’d have liked a bit more detail about some things and I thought some of Mia’s actions late in the book didn’t quite make sense, but I’m not going to complain about Anton being practically perfect.
I listened to this book in less than 24 hours so it clearly worked well enough to hold my attention. I am a sucker for a rescue and Anton was very much the knight in shining armour. Mia was a damsel in distress in some ways but she wasn’t helpless and she did more than her fair share to help Anton too – she totally saved his bacon with Uncle Dix for example.
The narration was a bit of a mixed bag for me. Madeleine Dauer narrates the sections from Mia’s perspective and Erik Bloomquist narrates those portions from Anton’s. Both of the performers had pluses and minuses.
Ms. Dauer did well when she was voicing Mia but I didn’t care for her depiction of Anton all that much and there were times when she sounded kind robot-like, particularly when she was outside of Mia’s thoughts or words.
Mr. Bloomquist had good expression in his voice when he was voicing Anton and I liked his female character voices, but he lost a lot of expression when he was delivering Mia’s lines.
That said, the narration did grow on me over the course of the book. Frankly I put that down to that I liked the characters and the tropes were really working for me more than anything else.
Technically I noticed a few errors but nothing major. And, I did listen to the entire book in about a day so the issues I had with the narration weren’t significant enough for me to stop my iPod.
There is little conflict between Anton and Mia – they clearly belong together but sometimes that’s exactly the kind of story I want to listen to – for me, Anton was the right audiobook at the right time.
Kaetrin
Buy Anton by Brenda Rothert on Amazon
