The Perfect Match by Kristan Higgins

Narrated by Amy Rubinate

When Higgins does it right, she hits it right out of the park – The Perfect Match was amazing.

Honor Holland starts out in love with her high school friend Brogan, who is really just her fuck buddy. At least to him. So the prologue is awkward and cringe-worthy, revealing that Brogan is willing to sleep with her but is shocked when she brings up marriage after 15 years of friend-benefits. It gets worse when her supposed best friend steps into the breach and steals Brogan for herself.

Tom Barlow is a British mechanical engineering professor, living in the area to be near his Almost Stepson – the son of his now-deceased fiancée. While Tom was living with the former fiancée and her son Charlie, the boy had idolized Tom. But now he’s a sullen teen who hates everyone. And Tom’s green card is getting ready to expire.

This is a classic marriage of convenience – Tom needs an American wife to secure his green card, and Honor needs a husband because she and her noisy reproductive system ain’t getting any younger. Of course, Higgins lets us know in a million ways that they have, as Dr. Droog Dragul would say, ze cleek, the spark of interest, lust, attraction, so it’s not entirely a felony in the making. But each is just enough scarred by their situations that it’s hard for either one to totally give in. Tom feels that, once again, he’s in a relationship where his beloved is in love with someone else; Honor is reminded in so many ways that she is just a means for Tom to get his green card. Neither one can be convinced that the other might actually have feelings for him/her, in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

This is totally my absolute favorite contemporary romance of 2013, maybe favorite book of 2013, all genres – the humor, the overwhelming emotion, the love not just between Tom and Honor, but between Honor and her family, between Tom and Charlie, the wonderful, real relationships overlaid with zany I-Love-Lucy situational comedy; it’s all there in a neat ~440 page/12 hour romance. Higgins carries over themes from The Best Man in this, the second in the Blue Heron series. I adored the family wine tastings with the elaborate descriptions – my favorite Abby line in the book: “I’m getting overtones of fog and unicorn tears, with just a hint of baby’s laughter.” The terrifying housekeeper, Mrs. Johnson, is there with her fierce love and stern mothering. The laugh-out-loud TMI sex life of Honor’s older sister Pru and husband Carl, contrasted with the irascible bickering “grands”, Pops and Goggy. The emotional reunions at the end had me tearing up while I drove, laughing and listening in the car.

Now let’s talk about the narration. I read the book in ebook format first, partly because I wanted to get it in my head before hearing Amy Rubinate’s narration. I gave her narration of the first book in the series, The Best Man, a C because, while passable, I felt she didn’t convey the book’s various emotions, especially humor. She has an almost whisper quality to her narrative voice, not 100% focused, as if she is reading quietly to a child at night, and in The Best Man, it felt near to monotone, more suited to suspense than comedy. I listened carefully for her comic delivery and timing this time. It is improved from the earlier book, but there were still sections that I thought were funny when I read them that, when she reads them in her more serious tone, seem more like bad ideas than funny plot devices. It’s a tightrope – the story has tragedy, and Higgins tries to lighten the adversity with humorous situations. This is what makes the story so enjoyable – the realistic struggles and the human and sometimes funny ways her characters deal with them. When the narration doesn’t reflect the humor, it affects the meaning and intent.

Rubinate does a great job with pitch, lowering the male voices so that they are easily distinguished from the females, but I felt her character voices were not as easily recognizable from each other except by gender. Honor’s older sister Pru sounds too similar to Pru’s teen daughter Abby. Rubinate used the same register for 14-year-old Charlie as she did for all the adult men. Only the slight application of an undetermined accent made Tom’s voice distinct. She did a good job with the Slavic Droog Dragul voice, helped by Higgins’ transcribing the part phonetically, but Tom’s accent, described as blue-collar Manchester, was not as convincing. And Higgins wrote in a couple of great convos with Spike, the tiny terror of a dog – “Yark! Yark!” – that Rubinate just glossed over, a missed opportunity for fun, in my opinion.

All in all, Rubinate is a good, experienced narrator – I took a lot of notes throughout because my expectations are so high, and her narration is so close, but not quite what I hoped for. Higgins’ humor shone through – I laughed out loud at several clever moments, and I was grinning through my tears at the epilogue. It’s a wonderful, wonderful story – a slice-of-life, small-town, feel-good romance, no suspense, no murders, no billionaires, no SEALs. Just regular folks facing regular lives, looking for love and hope and companionship, facing the let-downs and tragedies of life in regular ways. I wanted the same level of wonder in the narration, and I didn’t quite get there.

Melinda

---

Narration: B-/C+

Book Content: A++

Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in but pretty tame all the same

Violence: Minimal: A girlfight in a bar, a boxing mishap

Genre: Contemporary Romance – rom-com, small town

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.

 

 

 

The Perfect Match was provided to AudioGals for review by Blackstone Audio, Inc.

[jwl-utmce-widget id=32435]

Save