Karen B

I just can’t.

Revisado: 08-09-21

It takes a lot for me to abandon a book without finishing, but only a spectacularly terrible book can make me completely give up after only one chapter. Even if I could stand to listen to one more minute of Christine Marshall’s high-pitched, whiny, breathy voice—which I absolutely could NOT—the characters were pathetic! The main girl was so naive and stupid that, despite holding in her hand a note from her roommate (Tara) saying that Tara had a gambling addiction and had sold all Ellie’s furniture to pay for “rehab” (which Ellie was stupid enough to believe), it took her almost the entire conversation with the angry guy who had burst into her apartment to figure out that her roommate had stolen her identity to play online poker and subsequently lost the $7,000 the guy was insisting she owed him, although I don’t think it actually counts as identity theft if all the roommate did was use Ellie’s name and not her social security number. That brings me to how stupid Fin is. He cannot legally enforce a debt that was agreed to by someone’s typing mere initials on an online contract. How has he NEVER CONSIDERED THE POSSIBILITY that a player might not use his or her real name? I seriously wanted to reach into that conversation and slap both of them upside their heads.

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Cute and sweet, but a bit lacking

Revisado: 06-20-21

(Contains some light spoilers)
The story was cute and sweet. If you’re looking for a hot-and-heavy romance, this isn’t it, but it is heartwarming. There were a few aspects to the story that weren’t included that I wish had been. Jett’s initial message to Cassie on the dating website is nowhere to be found. When the audio started in on his reading Cassie’s reply, I was confused and rewound to see if I had inadvertently missed something, but, no, I hadn’t. This seemed like a strange omission, and I would have liked to have been privy to how he had started out their correspondence. I was never quite clear on what Sarah did for work (prior to becoming a paramedic) that allowed her to watch Jett’s kids so often. Then towards the end, it is never explained how Trina has managed to be driving around with her kids when they had supposedly been with Sarah while Jett was at work. Nor are we told what happened with Star’s uncle that led to her and her sisters’ being returned to Cassie. Given the detailed struggles that Jett and Cassie had gone through with their respective kids, it seemed like these parts of the story were simply glossed over in the interest of wrapping it up quickly. As for the performances, Kevin Kilpatrick’s voice was a little too high when he was reading male dialogue, making him sound a bit whiny. Liz Stanislawski didn’t differentiate between male and female voices, so it was often confusing as to who was talking. Furthermore, she repeatedly mispronounced several very common words, like “vaguely” and “tulle.” All in all it was a fun listen, but I don’t think I will be seeking out other books written by this author or read by these narrators.

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The reader is terrible.

Revisado: 06-06-21

I just could not stand the reader. She has a weird and unnatural way of speaking that made the book impossible to listen to. I didn’t make past the first chapter, which is unfortunate since the book itself had an interesting premise and seemed to be shaping up pretty well.

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Borrrring

Revisado: 11-21-20

I was wondering how Blakely was going to squeeze an interesting story into a 1 hour 17 minute production, and, sure enough, she didn’t. The storyline was just so-so, the rapport between Skylar and Caleb was awkward, the resolution felt far too easy, and for whatever reason all the conversations between characters and the kissing and the sexy times trailed off and then skipped to the next scene so that we missed out on the actual substance.

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My Least Favorite of the Cupcake Club Series

Revisado: 11-21-20

Having listened to all four books in the Cupcake Club Series in the last few days, I can confidently say that this was my least favorite. The sudden inclusion of clairvoyance in what was otherwise a realistic, if quirky, setting was too far a stretch for my liking. I purposely steer clear of books with supernatural themes because they just aren't my cup of tea, so to have one thrust upon me as the conclusion to a series was disconcerting and disappointing.


Also unrealistic was how Dylan's entire personality seemed to change almost overnight. His surly, taciturn demeanor quite rapidly transformed into lovesick and overtly affectionate. Dylan and Honey's decision to move in together after knowing each other for what amounted to two or three weeks adds to the dubiousness of their relationship.


As with all of the Cupcake Club books, the characters' waffling ends up being redundant. It seems like they make the same arguments and justifications for their feelings and decisions over and over again before finally just giving in without having really experienced any kind of personal growth. This also makes it seem like I’ve listened to less of the book than I actually have. When Honey Pie’s epilogue came on, I was surprised, having assumed that there would be a good deal more story to listen to. My first thought was that this book must have been several hours shorter than the first three, but in fact it is only very slightly shorter. There just wasn’t enough story there for me to realize how long I had been listening.


Alva's meddling reaches new heights in this book, and is frankly pretty off-putting. She went from being an eccentric busybody to being pushy and rude and completely catapulting over the line between an acceptable level of interest in a new neighbor and an overbearing and overwhelming force trying to wedge herself into the business of a young woman who clearly isn't comfortable with that amount of intrusion. That the denizens of Sugarberry simply accept Alva's nosiness as a charming aspect of her personality even when her gossiping reveals their own secrets is annoying and counterproductive.


Kauffman needs to vary her vocabulary. Most, if not all, of the books featured the same words: capitulate, veritable, visceral, poleax, as well as a couple others. These are all perfectly good words, but it was as though the author had to fill a quota in each book. It felt unnatural for them to appear in each story. She also made a couple of mistakes in details along the way. In the first book, she says that Charlotte moved from New Delhi to America at the age of 12, but in a subsequent book it is said that Charlotte moved from Dubai when she was 18, although her accent remains Indian throughout the series. Carlo was originally from a Puerto Rican family, but this changed to Cuban at the same time that Charlotte's origin story changed. Baxter's cooking show is described in the first book as being on network tv, but later in the series it is mentioned that his show had just recently moved to network tv.


As for Amanda Ranconi's performance, much of it was fine, though nothing special. The part that I had a problem with was when she had to affect an accent for one or another of the characters. Over the course of the series, she was required to speak as an elderly Southern woman, a British man who had supposedly morphed his Cockney accent into an East End one, a woman who had moved from India to New York as a preteen, a man from the Bronx who covered up his natural accent with an affected French one, a snobby older Southern woman, a younger Southern woman, two different younger Southern men, and a man who grew up just outside D.C. but who had inexplicably gained a Southern accent while spending the summers of his youth in Georgia even though he hadn't been back in over a decade. I'm not saying that all those different voices would be easy for one person to do, but oftentimes I had trouble figuring out who was speaking because her Indian accent would start to sound British, or the Indian and fake French accents would sound too similar when those two people were in the same conversation. There were many times when the author indicated that the British man or the Indian woman thickened his or her accent, but that distinction was not evident in Ranconi's reading of their dialogue. If a book has so many disparate voices, the producers of the audiobook might want to consider having it read by a full cast so that each of the characters can be heard as intended.


The endings to the stories are a bit lackluster and unsatisfying. The epilogues typically only jump a few weeks into the future, so we don't really get a sense of a true HEA. Even with the clairvoyant woman, we only get a secondhand description of the vision she had for their future, but there is no indication of how long it takes for that to happen. She hasn't even opened her store by the end of the epilogue, which was several months after the end of the main story.


This series ultimately wasn't for me, but if you're not a stickler for the details, and you enjoy sweet romances with a little bit of spice, then you should go ahead and try it out.

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Saccharine “News Articles” Fall Short

Revisado: 11-12-20

My biggest problems with this book were the two “articles” Ever writes about Linc for The New York Post lifestyle section. First of all, The New York Post is a real publication, but it is far from a quality news source. It is, in fact, infamous for its tabloid sensationalism. If the author intended for Ever to be working for this real life publication, then the unbelievably low caliber of Ever’s writing makes sense. Her juvenile “articles” have no journalistic value whatsoever unless they are being published in Seventeen Magazine. But we are given the impression that The New York Post in the book is a respectable news outlet from which Ever plans to launch a serious journalism career. In such a setting, her “articles” would never pass muster. Her second, longer “article” is more akin to a teenager’s angsty love letter. It has no business appearing in a legitimate newspaper. This confusing platform for Ever’s writing made the whole situation totally unbelievable.

As for the narration, I have never really been a fan of either Charlotte North or Matthew Holland. It seems like every book I have heard either of them read has come across as overly sweet and yearning (on her part) and so halting and seemingly confused (on his part) that I am left wondering if he is reading from a teleprompter that only reveals one or two words at a time. I really hope the rest of the series switches up the narrators.

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Contains Spoilers!

Revisado: 08-26-20

Having listened to a number of L. J. Shen's books and really liked them for the most part, I was pretty disappointed by this book. The overarching story was enjoyable enough, even if the writing quality wasn’t. The cast of characters definitely wasn’t the standard. In addition to the pro-MMA fighter hero and the underachieving tomboy hipster heroine, you have the tomboy’s lingerie model twin sister with a voice that could shatter glass (and they actually have a really close relationship), her childhood best guy friend (who reveals his romantic feelings for her much to her confusion and dismay), and her irreverent leather-pants-clad grandmother living in a retirement home. I wish the relationship between the sister and the best friend had been explained in more detail. We find out the bare minimum of the history of their feud, but not really what followed the inciting incident that caused it to grow into the awkward but mutual disdain they seem to have for each other. Nor is there any real resolution to their dispute or clarification of whether the best friend actually had feelings for the heroine or was merely trying to upset her sister.

If you’re wondering why I qualified that “the OVERARCHING story was enjoyable,” it’s because the basic plot outline had promise, but then the specifics that Shen employed to flesh it out missed the mark. When Blaire asks Ty if he has been completely honest with her, he admits that he has been keeping something from her that he isn’t quite ready to talk about YET, but he asks her to promise that she won’t abandon him when he does tell her. Seeing as how they had only been dating for a few weeks, it seems completely acceptable that he hasn’t revealed all of his deepest, darkest secrets, but while he does indicate that he will tell her in the future, his request that she promise prematurely not to break up with him over it seems unfair given the fledgling status of their relationship. But even though she agrees to his request, she claims to love him, and the secret entirely predates his relationship with her, when she finds out what the secret is before he tells her, she drops him faster than a hot potato. Was the secret huge? Yes. Would it have been a hard pill for anyone to swallow? Yes. But she was supposedly in love with him, yet didn’t even wait to hear his side of things before she totally wrote him off. What did she expect his secret to be anyhow? Obviously it was going to be bad, or else he would have told her right away. And then of all the things that could have made her rethink her position on what he had done, it was her new boss’s harebrained justification for why athlete’s use steroids? I’m not into sports, but the rationale that athletes are so competitive by nature that they are willing to do anything to win just seems counterintuitive. I’m sure that there are plenty of pro athletes who are guilty of steroid abuse, but I highly doubt that it is the majority, and that’s likely due to two reasons: 1. Steroids are terrible for your body, so any athlete with half a brain would stay away from them if their ultimate goal is to be in the best physical condition possible. 2. I would imagine that most pro athletes who have spent their lives working toward a nearly impossible goal would feel like they had cheated not just their teammates, their rivals, and their fans by taking a shortcut, but they would also feel like they had cheated themselves and thus wouldn’t feel any sort of pride or accomplishment in their ill-gotten success. And while what Ty is guilty of is very different from steroids, the same reasoning that led Blaire to dismiss Shane’s earlier accusation of Ty’s steroid use should have prevented Ty from getting mixed up in the actual secret--prostituting himself in exchange for both money and higher profile matches--to begin with. It, too, can be bad for your body (as Blaire rather judgmentally harps on, which doesn't even make sense since she already knew that Ty had slept with tons of women before they started dating) and can negatively impact your career. It’s seems quite likely that even though Ty wasn’t fixing matches, what he was doing still would have been frowned upon by his MMA league, not to mention the police, so if his goal was to succeed in his sport, then he took some pretty stupid and unnecessary risks, especially since he says that he started doing it soon after he got into the sport, meaning that he didn’t even give himself time to work his way up before resorting to dishonesty.

It makes absolutely no sense that Blaire is hired as a sports reporter for the magazine to which her journalism professor recommended her. The editor who interviewed her would have undoubtedly wanted to see some relevant samples of her writing, and the only piece she had ever written on sports was the MMA assignment for her class, but it was made pretty clear that the editor had never read that piece when he was surprised by her claim that she follows MMA, which she demonstrates by dropping Ty's name. If the editor had read the one sports-related article that she had written, then he would have known that she would be familiar with MMA. Since he obviously never read it, it is highly unlikely that he would have offered her the job--on the spot, no less.

I take issue with the number of times the heroine says “literally.” She uses it both correctly and incorrectly, and it all adds up to way too much. The writing also contradicts itself a number of times. One example of this is that more than once it is mentioned that Ty does not give interviews, but the gym owner specifically tells Blaire to interview him, an old interview with him plays on the tv in the women’s locker room, a female tv reporter interviews him in the ring after the big fight, and a bunch of other print media outlets interview him right before he goes to Blaire’s hotel room. There are also things that are not direct contradictions but that don’t really make sense, like how the heroine keeps saying that her boobs—which are never described as being excessively large—pop out whenever she borrows clothes from her twin sister. Seeing as how the sister is a lingerie model, she would probably have a pretty decently sized chest herself.

The love scenes were really only glossed over, so if you’re looking for a sexy read, beware that this isn’t it. And the HEA left a lot to be desired. It would have benefited from an epilogue.

The narrator definitely impeded whatever enjoyment I might have managed to glean from this book. She has a weird way of speaking that makes her sound like she is constantly grinning like a maniac, which really doesn’t match the heroine’s sarcastic personality. Plus she has a bad habit of pausing at random places in a sentence as though she had been holding her breath and needed to stop to let it out and take a new deep breath before continuing, which breaks up the flow and ends up being distracting as I try to figure out if there was a comma there that possibly changes the meaning of the sentence from what I thought she was getting at or if she was just pausing for no reason. And then there would oftentimes be no pause at all between scenes within the same chapter, so one second she is talking alone with one guy, and the next she is in a different location with another guy with no indication that time had passed in between. She also needs to work on differentiating between the lines that the heroine speaks out loud to the other characters and the lines that are thought privately in her own head, because I frequently had trouble figuring out if the hero was hearing all the stuff she was saying or if that was just for the reader/listener.

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Pointless

Revisado: 08-06-20

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS

This book was an utterly pointless addition to the Fallen Crest series. I listened to this considerably long series because I first came upon The Boy I Grew Up With and then the Crew duet, and I liked those well enough--despite a few complaints--only to find out that this series actually came before them. But I became increasingly disenchanted with Tijan's writing with each Fallen Crest installment. The storylines were unnecessarily complex while the motivations of the characters were exceedingly juvenile (e.g. The leader of the popular crowd at the private school seeks revenge because the rich, popular football star and his brother chose to attend the public school, and she whines that they should have been HER friends. Seriously?). All of the adults behave reprehensibly and then wonder what on earth causes their teenage children to act out.

Each book was littered with inconsistencies, contradictions, and implausabilities. I could write an entire novel just fixing the mistakes the author makes about her own characters and timeline. For example, Becky Salloway, Jeff Salloway's cousin, is erroneously called Becky Sullivan in one book and is said to be Tate Sullivan's cousin, but then she goes back to being Salloway in the subsequent book. Adam Quinn is said to have been accepted to Harvard Law School, but he is only going into his junior year of undergrad, so there's no way he would have been accepted to law school yet. The group's second house at Cain University supposedly has a security perimeter around it that sends an alert to their cell phones if anyone other than them crosses it. How exactly does that work? Are the four residents of the house microchipped? And how come other people--like Adam Quinn--keep entering the property without any alerts being sent? Why is the friendship between Becky and Sam put up on a pedestal when they were really only friends for like three weeks? In high school Sam is recruited by Cain University at her cross country meet, and she says that they are extra interested in her when the scout finds out she also runs track and field, yet in Fallen Crest Forever (book 7), which starts at the beginning of her junior year at Cain, we are told that she never went out for the cross country team, only the track team, which, scholarship aside, doesn't make sense because long-distance running is what she excels at. In Fallen Crest Forever (book 7), Sam says that had Taylor arrived any earlier when Adam Quinn was threatening Mason with a gun that it would have been Taylor's second gun-related incident, the first being when her mother was shot and killed in front of her. But the second incident was in Logan Kade (book 5.5) when Taylor herself is shot at by her friend's bookie. Then the third incident was in Fallen Crest Home (book 6) when they attend a party in Rousseau where a biker shoots a rival biker, an event that Taylor specifically likens to the incident with her mother. So Adam Quinn would have been Taylor's FOURTH gun-related incident.

That brings me to this book. I unfortunately read a couple reviews that contained spoilers but didn't warn against them prior to listening to the book, so I had some idea of what to expect, and I was not looking forward to it. That being said, those reviews were wrong. REMINDER: THIS CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR FALLEN CREST NIGHTMARE. The book does not really take place before the events in Fallen Crest Forever, the previous book in the series. The events in Fallen Crest Nightmare take place AFTER the events in the main part of Forever, but before the time period covered in Forever's epilogue. This confused me immensely when I took into account the other review that said that Taylor dies in this book since she is present in Forever's epilogue. I chalked it up to another inconsistency on the author's part--albeit a MAJOR one--but when I listened to the whole book, I found that there was an explanation for it. There was not, however, an explanation for why the costume Sam saw on the creepy guy at the club was on her and Mason's bedroom floor. Was Mason the guy at the club? That doesn't make any sense since he wouldn't have had time to get there from Los Angeles that fast, nor would he want to scare Sam. Did he just happen to have the same costume as the creepy guy? Or did Sam see the costume prior to going to the club and then in her drunken haze just imagine some guy wearing it? That also probably doesn't make sense because Mason hadn't been in Fallen Crest before she went to the club, so how would she have seen his costume? Did the creepy guy break into their house and leave the costume in their room to scare them? That's the most likely scenario, but Mason doesn't seem weirded out by the presence of the costume, nor do they follow up on it. So it just remains unexplained.

Then the "bonus scene" at the end served no purpose whatsoever. If the novella was intended as just a scary story, then it should have ended on the discovery of the mysterious costume. In that case the costume would have made more sense as a spine-tingling cliffhanger meant to make you speculate as to how it got there, but instead they go about their business the next day intending to scare some frat guy who had been harassing a female classmate. And Sam's plan to scare the guy while he is working in a haunted house by playing sound effects of a woman screaming and other scary noises is asinine. HE'S WORKING IN A HAUNTED HOUSE! All those sounds would be expected to be heard in that setting, so why would they scare him?

This novella shouldn't even really be included in the Fallen Crest series. It doesn't add anything to the story, especially since it is book 7.5 after Fallen Crest Forever (book 7), which concludes with the flash forward HEA. In fact, there is really no reason why this story needed to be about the Fallen Crest group of characters. It could have featured a brand new cast and been much more enjoyable considering how the preexisting histories of the Fallen Crest group contribute to the unbelievability of the plot. Furthermore, this book spent so much time recapping the characters' relationships that it ended up being a lot longer than it needed to be. All of the books in the series do a little bit of recap of important details from previous books just like most series do to refresh the memories of readers/listeners who consume the books as they are released rather than one right after the other once they have all been released, but this book went overboard. This is probably because it was originally featured in a magazine, where I suppose it would likely be read by people who had not necessarily read/listened to the rest of the books, but being in the category of people who listened to all the books consecutively, the excessive recap was annoying.

Basically, you can skip this book, probably even the whole series.

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THIS WAS THE MOST GOD AWFUL BOOK!

Revisado: 07-25-20

The entire series has been pretty bad. I only finished it because I hate not finishing books and series once I’ve started them. But this book was bad on a whole other level.

The female protagonist was PATHETIC! She had no backbone, no gumption, no self-esteem, and no self-respect. I feel stupider and shallower as a woman for having listened to it. (The rest of the review contains some minor spoilers.) Lacey supposedly falls inextricably in love with Henry very quickly, which I know is theoretically possible, but the man is a grade-A jerk with zero redeeming qualities. The only aspects of his being that she ever comments on are physical—he’s good looking and good in bed. She never describes anything deeper than surface-level attraction, and it is entirely incomprehensible what she could possibly love about a man who not only doesn’t share any part of his private life with her but who tells her repeatedly that he doesn’t want a relationship with her, they are not dating, he doesn’t do love, etc. Every time he pushes her away or she realizes that he doesn’t feel the same way about her that she feels about him, she resolves to stay away, but that only lasts about a minute before her undying love for him draws her back in. She is so desperate for him to love her back that her wishful thinking imbues everything he says with meaning that just isn’t there. That is, it isn’t there until the very last scene, two months after he definitively tells her that he doesn’t love her, when he flip flops and says that he actually loved her the whole time but was simply afraid of his feelings, which only serves to validate all her psychotic behavior up to that point.

This book's characterization of Henry, which actually started towards the end of the previous book, is completely at odds with how he was portrayed in the earlier books in the series. At first, he came across as a really nice guy, fairly normal, just with a large bank account. Here he is a horrible, womanizing jerk, and apparently none of the other characters from the earlier books actually knows him all that well.

Each of the books in the series has featured questionably legal sexual advances from the male protagonists (including sexual assault in the first book, statutory rape in the second book, and sexual harassment in the workplace in the third and fourth books). In this book, Henry purposely walks in on Lacey while she is changing, corners her when she tells him to leave, and proceeds to take off his own clothes amidst Lacey’s verbal protests. But despite her apparent attempts to get him to leave, her inner monologue reveals her deep attraction to him and mental conflict over how to react to his advances. This sort of psychological backtracking paints real victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault in a bad light. It makes it seem like “No” doesn’t necessarily mean “No,” and it’s okay for a guy to disregard the word if he believes that the woman is simply playing hard to get or that she will come around eventually. It is insulting and degrading to all women who depend upon their right to refuse unwanted sexual advances.

A much more minor complaint that actually dates back to the first book in the series but that only became particularly annoying in this book is Henry’s full name—Henry James—which Lacey uses over and over again instead of just referring to him by his first name as all the characters in the previous books did. Why would the authors give a character the same name as a famous and influential author if it didn’t have any sort of significance to the story at hand? The parallel isn’t even mentioned in any of the books in the series, and every time I heard Lacey say the name, all I could do was wonder why the authors did that. It was immensely distracting from the story.

The only good part of this installment in the series was that way fewer sentences ended with the phrase “as well.” It was pervasive in all the other books—as though the authors had never heard of “too,” “also,” “additionally,” “furthermore,” “moreover,” et al.—but, for whatever reason, it thankfully tapered off considerably in this book.

All in all, this book is a disgusting excuse for a “romance” novel, merely perpetuating chauvinistic and misogynistic views of women.

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This was the last straw.

Revisado: 01-25-20

After finishing At Any Moment, the third installment in Brenna Aubrey’s Gaming the System series, I am doing something utterly unheard of for me: I’m stopping a series before reaching the end. The first book in the series, At Any Price, was entirely predictable and, thus, pretty anticlimactic, but it was interesting enough to justify continuing to the second book. At Any Turn was just as predictable, but also endlessly redundant, and every time one of the characters resolved to act differently in order to break out of the tangle of lies and drama, it lasted about five seconds before he/she reverted to his/her previous destructive way of thinking or acting. There was no personal growth whatsoever, causing whiplash with every abrupt failed attempt at it. This ultimately rendered the book rather pointless. Still, I persisted. I warily started listening to At Any Moment, hoping that the characters would miraculously learn from their mistakes and move forward in their storyline. Alas, the third book was more of the same as the second. While there was more substance to this plot, the reluctance of the characters to do any amount of soul searching until the very end made for an infuriating listen, especially since these books are so long. Honestly, each book could have been shortened by at least three hours, and it still would have been a waste of my time. Consequently, I am giving up on this series. It’s not even worth it to hear the HEA.

Furthermore, there was something wrong with the audio quality. The volume kept wavering. And at one point, at least part of the end of one chapter got cut off.

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