Narrated by Brittany Pressley
I enjoyed Well Met, the first book in the series of the same name, set in and around the small community of Willow Creek and their annual Renaissance Faire. Well Matched features the older sister of the heroine in the first book so there’s a fairly close connection to it. While the books stand alone well and it was not necessary to have read book 2 (Well Played), I do think Well Met gives added context to April that helped me here.
April Parker is a 40-ish single mother of a nearly-18 year old daughter Kaitlin. She was married and their birth control failed. Her husband divorced her and relinquished his parental rights and ever since, it’s been April and Kate. Now Kate is about to graduate high school and go off to college and April will be an empty nester. She plans to fix her house up over the summer in order to put it on the market in September and move closer to her work.
Despite living in Willow Creek for many years, she hasn’t formed close relationships with anyone – at least, not until her sister came to stay 3 years earlier when April had been in a car accident and had injured her leg. Emma came to help look after Kate and April, and ended up falling in love with Simon and staying. Through Emma, April now has connections to and in Willow Creek but she still holds herself aloof from relationships. She’s very concerned with what people think of her and is almost fanatical about not letting people know her business.
Mitch Malone is the gym teacher at the local high school and good buddies with Simon, Emma’s husband. Mitch plays a shirtless, kilted Scotsman at the Ren Faire and every year he and Simon stage a fight during “Human Chess” (it sounds fantastic and so much fun. Would watch). Mitch is in his early 30s, is big and broad, fit and very well-muscled. He’s also under pressure from his over-achieving family to get himself a girlfriend and, as it turns out, Mitch is after a buffer from some of the more demanding members of his family too – so he asks April to be his fake girlfriend for a family event. April agrees in return for Mitch’s help with fixing up her house and so the pair spend quite a bit of time together.
It was obvious to this listener that Mitch was head over heels for April almost from the start even though the story is told exclusively in April’s first person point of view. April assumes this could not be the case for much of the book. Mitch does have a reputation as a bit of party boy and a player but after he starts spending time with April he’s a changed man.
One thing leads to another and April and Mitch begin hooking up but April thinks it’s just physical for him and is reluctant to admit to herself that her feelings are involved. She’s also wanting desperately to keep the town out of her business and so she treats Mitch like a dirty little secret. I never quite understood why she would be ashamed of Mitch. He’s a catch.
Eventually Mitch has enough of this – as you would! – and then we have the inevitable reconciliation. This might seem a bit spoilery but the plot is fairly obvious (that’s not a criticism) and the book has been out for a while now. But also, I wanted to talk about that reconciliation. April was hard to like at times. She wasn’t good with her words or letting people into her life. Mitch is the big giver in the relationship and with rare exceptions, it felt to me like April wasn’t pulling her weight in it. Mitch was so generous with his time and so very patient while he waited for April to get with the program and she treated him very poorly. I thought he deserved some plain-speaking and heartfelt declarations from April rather than a cutesy stunt.
Because April didn’t really communicate throughout the book, the conversation about their age gap was extremely short, right at the end and not well setup within the text, even though I was expecting Mitch to feel the way he did.
I’ve enjoyed narrations by Brittany Pressley before but it took me a while to get into her performance here. Part of that may have been that I struggled to like April at times but mainly it was because of the uneven pacing particularly at the beginning of the book. It evened out by the midway point but up until then, there were times when Ms. Pressley’s timing was a bit off and she read too fast. I tried to adjust the speed on my iPod but I couldn’t find the sweet spot.
However, after about the halfway mark (or maybe even before then) I wasn’t noticing this issue and I settled into the listen.
I enjoyed the variety of character voices Ms. Pressley used. She also had a good display of appropriate sentiment but this was somewhat limited by April (who, recall, is the only POV character) and her emotional constipation.
I enjoyed Well Met better than Well Matched, mainly because I liked Emma better than April. I didn’t hate her by any stretch; she wasn’t evil but she was so emotionally stunted I didn’t quite buy her transformation into HEA-land.
Kaetrin
Buy Well Matched by Jen DeLuca on Amazon
