Narrated by Todd Haberkorn and Cris Dukehart
Ignite is a heart-wrenching story about first love, coping with the death of a spouse, and second chances. Be prepared for an emotional roller coaster! While the story follows the love life of the heroine, Alexa Sullivan Tate, it is actually written from both her point of view and that of her first love, Jace McAllister, who she reunites with following the death of her husband. Further reinforcing this stylistic approach, is the dual-narration provided by Chris Dukehart, who narrates the chapters that are told from Alexa’s point of view, and Todd Haberkorn, who narrates the chapters that are told from Jace’s point of view.
We first meet Alexa nearly a year after the death of her husband, Ty Tate. Devastated by her loss, she is a shadow self of the person she used to be. Her somewhat meddling sister, desperately seeking a way to bring back to life this young widow of only 27 years of age, hatches a plan to reunite Alexa with Jace. On the ruse of needing a babysitter, Sierra convinces Alexa to go back to their hometown to attend Sierra’s ten-year high school reunion.
Alexa and Jace had been best friends throughout most of high school. Alexa, a huge baseball fan, and Jace, a star baseball player for their high school team, easily got along and were inseparable. While everyone else could see the love connection, Alexa and Jace spent three years ignoring this spark, too afraid to lose their special friendship. On graduation night, Jace finally opens up to Alexa, also delivering the stunning news that he has forgone a baseball scholarship to enlist in the army and will be leaving for training camp the very next day. Consumed by the heat of the moment, and the unleashing of feelings that had been pent up for three years, Alexa gives Jace her virginity that night. Promising to return for her, Jace leaves as planned but due to a series of misunderstandings and unfortunate events, he is never able to locate her again. For ten years, Jace, thinking he had lost his one and only true love, has never let a woman get close to him.
Crushed that the love of her life never returned for her, a few years later Alexa meets Ty, and after a whirlwind romance, they marry. They lead a mostly happy life for over seven years, and Alexa considers herself rather lucky to have found true love for a second time. Destiny, however, has other plans and Ty dies in a car accident leaving her sure that she will never be able to feel love again.
When they finally find each other again at the reunion, it’s like Alexa and Jace have never been apart. The attraction is instantly there, raw and passionate, and they can’t get enough of each other, spending nearly every waking moment that weekend together. Jace is still in the army and completing a tour in Afghanistan. He again promises he will return for her, and departs to complete the remaining two months of his tour. This time, however, they do stay in touch.
Nonetheless, a relationship for Alexa and Jace will be a steep hill to climb. Alexa resists calling what they have a relationship causing Jace much angst. At first, neither of them is sure that Alexa will ever be able to fully get over Ty’s loss. Moreover, Alexa is deathly afraid to allow herself to feel love again for anyone, much less Jace, given the inherent risk in his army career. She is convinced that he too will die and leave her. Can this second chance love ever work given all the obstacles in its way?
I have to say that Ignite was unlike any other romance audiobook I have listened to in a long time. It was so emotionally exhausting! From the strong feelings of experiencing love for the first time, to the disappointment of losing your first love, to the overwhelming joy of reuniting with a past love and even the extreme devastation of losing a loved one and the haunting fear of never being able to love again for fear of being cheated by death again. At times, it felt like a therapy session. I actually felt like a psychologist with Alexa and Jace sitting on my couch spilling their entire stories and deepest feelings. Ms. Teevan’s writing is to be commended. She truly does an amazing job of memorializing these extreme range of emotions.
My only reservations with respect to the writing is that, at times, I wanted to stop some of the negative feelings, as a romance is supposed to be, for the most part, happy. In any event, at a few points I definitely felt the message could have been communicated in a more condensed fashion. On the later point specifically, this was an 11 hour audiobook that could have been condensed to around 8 hours with more careful editing without sacrificing the message or the impact of the story. Particularly at the beginning of the book, but in several other parts as well, the story was quite slow. However, if you hang in there, it is worth the wait, as this is really a special listen.
I am a big fan of dual narrations. When well performed, they can vastly enhance the overall dramatic effect of a book. However, I would have preferred to hear Ms. Dukehart deliver all the female roles and Mr. Haberkorn all the male. Instead, the narration is divided by chapters based on either Alexa or Jace’s point of view which means that every other chapter Alexa, Jace, and all the secondary characters have different voices depending on the chapter’s narrator. I found this a little hard to follow as it required me to pause at the beginning of each chapter and reset my memory for that narrator’s depiction of each character.
On the other hand, I was pleasantly surprised with both Ms. Dukehart’s and Mr. Haberkorn’s performances. This is my first experience with either of these narrators, and I have to say that their range of voices, pace, and delivery of emotion was fantastic. Both produce a range of believable male and female characterizations that were clearly distinguishable one from another. I especially loved Mr. Haberkorn’s portrayal of Jace – it had just the hint of a southern undertone that brought out the true gentleman in this classic hero.
All in all, Ignite was a good audiobook. Containing one of the most perfect heroes of all the romance books I have read or listened to, you just can’t help but fall in love with Jace. He is patient, thoughtful, considerate, sexy, romantic, and even a military hero who gave up a potentially lucrative baseball career to serve our country. Additionally, after all the tragedy that has befallen Alexa, you really want to cheer for her to finally get her HEA.
BJ
Narration: B+
Book Content: B-
Steam Factor: For your burning ears only
Violence: Minimal
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Publisher: Tantor Audio
Ignite was provided to AudioGals for review by Tantor Audio.
Thanks for the great review BJ! Dual narrations with the female narrator reading all the female characters’ dialogues and the male narrator doing the same for the male characters would be my choice of perfect narration. The prose could be read by one or the other but I would love to hear the dialogues spoken by true male and female voices. Male narrators tend to give female characters a high pitch I tend to dislike and that often grates on my nerves. Female narrators, on the other hand, can be very good narrating male voices but there are few who manage to make you forget there is a woman behind the male voice. I’d be grateful if you could recommend audiobooks with this kind of narration. I’ve listened to the first K.M. Mooning’s Highlander audiobooks read by Phil Gigante and I understand others in the series are narrated in this type of dual narration. Is this so? Any other recs? I’m willing to try some. Thanks a lot, have a lovely day!
Thank you Bea. The books I am aware of that use this dual narration format are the last two books of Karen Marie Moning’s Fever Series and Iced (the first book in her Fever spin-off series). I wish more books utilized this approach. I can only guess that it must be quite expensive to produce an audiobook in this way because in addition to paying for two narrators, you likely need to coordinate that they both be in the studio at the same time or spend a lot of time, and therefore money, editing in order to put the complete narration together. But I would love to hear the answer if someone knows for sure.
You are right BJ. It’s Karen Marie Moning’s Fever series, not the Highlander one. That dual narration format is perfect but it has to be more expensive, I assumed as much. Although I hope that as the number of audiobooks listeners grows steadily thanks to the increasing amount of available titles as downloads combined with the decrease of prices, specially those with the whispersync feature, the extra narrator’s fees would be worth the investment; the profits would be handsome and if listeners start demanding this format this type of narration could become standard. Let’s see what happens. This industry is just taking off as new digital technogies and devices are being developed daily. Thanks BJ, have a lovely day!