In the past two weeks, I’ve listened to three audiobooks — Little Beach Street Bakery by Jenny Colgan, and A Familiar Stranger by A.R. Torre, and Cloud Cookoo Land by Anthony Doer.
LITTLE BEACH STREET BAKERY, by Jenny Colgan: I’ve become a fan of Jenny Colgan since I discovered her work earlier this year. She writes Romance the way Romance should be written. Her heroines are plucky and resourceful, meet with adversity and overcome it, and are universally likeable people. I should elaborate on that last trait, but that’s a separate post. Little Beach Street Bakery is set in Cornwall, in the real-life village of Saint Michael’s Mount, fictionalized as Mount Polbearne. Colgan does a marvelous job of making the town an important character in its own right. The dialogue is natural, the characters (mostly) appealing. If the book has a weakness, it’s in its similarity to another of her books, The Bookshop on the Corner. These are feel-good, hopeful novels that will remind you of JoJo Moyes and Maeve Binchy.
A FAMILIAR STRANGER, by A.R. Torre: I decided to try this novel because it shows up in the “Also bought” line below the reviews of Evelyn Marsh, and because it has decent ratings and over 400 ratings. A Familiar Stranger is a unique psychological thriller told from multiple viewpoints, which the author plenty of room for misdirection and keeps the reader guessing. I found the beginning a little slow, but when the point of view changed, I was compelled to keep turning pages to figure out who was fooling whom. Unfortunately, the characters are, with one exception, unlikeable. Also, I found the moral denouement a little too pat for my taste, though it will probably satisfy most readers. Despite my reservations, A.R, Torre has crafted a page-turner here, and I intend to try more of her work.
CLOUD COOKOO LAND, by Anthony Doer: I don’t limit myself to one or two genres, I read across genres. After all, a good book is a good book. I love literary novels. Unfortunately, this highly rated literary/sci-fi novel fell short of the mark. The conceit isn’t enough to salvage these disjointed, dystopian stories. I felt Simon Jones’s narration made a buffoonery of what might have been an instructive little fable. Marin Ireland’s narration was adequate. But no narrator can improve a fatally flawed story. We are left with the belief that human beings haven’t learned anything over the past millennia, nor are we capable of improvement. How depressing!
I would have given up on this title early on, and only kept listening to the end because sometimes a book that starts badly is saved by a brilliant ending. Unfortunately, the ending of Cloud Cookoo Land was underwhelming. Not worth your time.
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