Better Than Chocolate by Sheila Roberts

Narrated by Gayle Hendrix

I picked this from the Just Released section of Audible.com, based solely on the short blurb and about 20 seconds of the sample. It sounded like a fun piece of Romantic Comedy – and it’s a Harlequin – and I like a piece of fluff when it’s well-written and funny. A hometown girl running the family business – a candy factory – comes up against a former football player hunky hero – but the catch is, the hero is working for the bank that holds the note to the business, and there’s been a missed payment or two. How will they save the business and start their relationship? It seemed like a promising premise.

As I neared the middle of the listen, my mind wandered. There are the books you like and maybe even love, and there are the books you don’t like, and maybe even hate. How does one describe the book that really wasn’t worth having an opinion about? I mean, when the author can get you so riled up about a character or a plot – even if you hate the character/plot – at least you have been moved. I was bored. The story meandered. The heroine, Samantha, made a fool of herself right off the bat with the banker, Blake, and continued to fume and loathe him right to the end. Her actions and reactions weren’t consistent enough to define a character. Blake, on the other hand, spent some time ogling her finer features as well as wondering how he could help her save the business. That was my only clue through most of the book that there might be a romance between the two. The bad gals and guys in the story were 1.5 dimensional – they didn’t even make it to 2 dimensions. Yawn. And the ending? You know how romance authors have a character think something lustful about the other, and then the character wonders, “Where did that come from?” <– that

Narrator Gayle Hendrix is, in a word, mediocre. She isn’t bad, but she isn’t very good either. She manages to create different characters with her voice. She pronounces all the words correctly. She even does ok with accents. Maybe if she had better material to work with…. No, never mind, I don’t believe that. She has a habit of resting on one of the first words in a sentence to the point where I kept thinking “Get on with it already!!” – it’s a common enough habit in C-list narrators. Her pacing is just slightly off – not too fast, not really too slow, but the cadence just isn’t natural. It’s as if someone gave her the direction to slow down or to enunciate more, and so random words are drawn out, over-enunciated. I’m guessing if the material had been more well-written, perhaps these ticks wouldn’t have irritated me quite as much. But this was not one of those experiences where the narrator became the story in your head; instead it was a case of “When will this be over so I can listen to a good book?”

PS: I also downloaded another Just Added with a narrator that sounds so much like Gayle Hendrix that I’m wondering about the whole pseudonym thing now: narrator Montana Chase reading a Blaze by Debbi Rawlins, Own The Night. More later…

Melinda

Narration: C-

Book Content: D

Steam Factor: You can play it out loud

Violence: None

Genre: Contemporary Romance

Publisher: Harlequin Enterprises, Ltd.