Narrated by Carmen Vine
I decided to listen to Island Affair after seeing the blurb included one of my favourite tropes – fake relationship – and listening to the narration sample from Carmen Vine which worked for me. As much as I like a fake relationship this one’s beginning did strain my credulity more than usual. I’m prepared to go with some pretty wild ideas to get the romance started but this one had me blinking a bit, I admit.
Luis Navarro is a firefighter for the Key West Fire Department in Florida, like much of the rest of his family. He’s on enforced leave for seven days because of some psychological trauma he’s not dealing with. Visiting his brother, Carlos, a firefighter based at the Key West Airport, he doesn’t receive the sympathy he hopes for. As he’s leaving, he overhears a woman in the car park having a discussion with her about-to-be ex-boyfriend.
Sara Vance is a lifestyle blogger and social media influencer in Key West for a week’s holiday with her family. She was the surprise baby and there is a 13-year age gap between her and her next oldest sibling. Her parents and older brother and sister are all respected and high-powered doctors. Sara is very much the odd duck in the bunch. She was mostly raised by a Spanish-speaking nanny (and is therefore fluent in the language herself) and is not very close to her family. She sees herself as the screw up and the misfit and it seems she has good reason for thinking her family agrees with her.
Sara is in recovery from an eating disorder. There is a fair bit of discussion about ED in the book and this may be an issue for some listeners to caution is advised. I’m not at all qualified to comment on how good the representation is.
Sara is in Key West to spend the week with her parents and siblings and their respective spouses (but not her niece and nephew which, in the circumstances, surprised me a little), after her mother was pronounced cancer free following lengthy and debilitating treatment. She, and her brother and sister, are all under strict instructions from their dad not to cause any drama this week as Sara’s mother needs low stress.
Sara had been low-key long distance dating a guy named Rick who was supposed to be joining her. The phone call Luis overhears is him bailing in Sara and Sara dumping him in return.
Sara and Luis strike up a conversation and within 10 minutes (TEN!) she is asking Luis if he will be her fake boyfriend for the week to be a buffer between her and her family and to ease their fears and concerns for her (because if she’s single, she’s not doing very well and they will be concerned – so the theory goes). I knew this was a romance so I could go with it. I knew that Luis was going to be a good guy because he’s a romance hero but when I thought about Sara inviting a strange man into her family’s home (for the next week at least) I baulked at the risk she took. If this were not a romance, he could easily have been a serial killer or a con man Sara!
Fortunately for everyone, Sara’s judgement of Luis is correct.
Luis’s trauma was a little unexpected. His fiancée had died in a car accident but the part he wasn’t over was that she had cheated on him with his younger brother, Enrique. So why he was having bad reactions to other car accidents he attended as a firefighter wasn’t exactly clear to me.
There is a strong theme of family reconciliation in the book. Given the entire thing took place in only seven days, I struggled a little with Luis poking his nose into Sara’s family issues and being very specific about what she should do. She didn’t invite him to do so and it felt a bit intrusive to me. Still, Sara pushed back and challenged him in turn, so it wasn’t all one-sided.
The romance of necessity develops very quickly and the ending felt unresolved. Luis lives and works in Key West; Sara is heading home to New York. What is the plan from here? I don’t know. It’s a pet peeve of mine to be missing information this way. I gave my iPod a very hard stare when the book just ended with so much unclear to me.
There is some hot and heavy (and well-written) foreplay between Sara and Luis once things turn physical, but the bedroom door closes abruptly when they are about to seal the deal, a decision which confused me. It’s not that I require on-page sex in books I enjoy – but this was a halfway house that failed to satisfy. I actually queried whether there was a part missing of my version at one point because the action moved from imminent penetration to Sara eating a grape in less time than it took to type the word “grape”.
The narration was good. I enjoyed Ms. Vine’s character voices and emotion. Her clearly fluent Spanish only benefitted the performance. There were one or two things that bothered me though.
Apparently a person who lives in Key West is a “Conch” – at the beginning and end of the book, it was pronounced with a “ch” sound as in bench but then in the middle section it was pronounced with a “k” sound as in bonk, which I found a little odd.
There were some double-barrel words which had pauses in between the barrels – for example, “chest-thumping” (as in chest-thumping excitement – there are no cavemen in the book!) became chest… thumping. There were times I had to mentally backtrack to work out the intention of the text.
In print where there is a conversation interspersed with inner monologue or narrative, I tend to skip to the rest of the conversation and backtrack (or not as the case may be) to the in-between bits later so I don’t lose track of the discussion. In audio I can’t do that. Unfortunately, Island Affair had a lot of interrupted conversations and I found myself getting impatient for the characters to get on with it.
The author obviously loves and is very familiar with Key West; the book was somewhat of an homage to the island and it became almost a character in the story.
I could easily see what drew Luis to Sara and vice versa. Their connection was obvious and enjoyable, but I really needed an epilogue to round out the story.
Kaetrin
Buy Island Affair by Priscilla Oliveras on Amazon
