Maid for Love by Marie Force

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Title: Maid for Love
Author: Marie Force
Series: Gansett Island #1
Published by: Audible Studios
Release Date: January 17, 2013
Format: Audiobook
Narrator: Holly Fielding
Length: 6 hours and 42 minutes
Genres: Romance, Contemporary
Source: Audible
Reading Challenges: Lenoreo's 2019 Audiobook Challenge, Lenoreo's COYER Winter 2018
Find it: Goodreads ✩ Amazon ✩ iTunes
My rating:

Blurb:

Maddie Chester is determined to leave her hometown of Gansett Island, a place that has brought her only bad memories and ugly rumors. Then she's knocked off her bike on the way to her housekeeping job at McCarthy's Resort Hotel by Gansett's "favorite son", Mac McCarthy. He's back in town to help his father with preparations to sell the family resort and has no intention of staying long. When Mac accidentally sends Maddie flying over the handlebars, badly injuring her, he moves in to nurse her back to health and help care for her young son. He soon realizes his plans for a hit-and-run visit to the island are in serious jeopardy, and he just may be "maid" for love.

My Review:

ORIGINAL REVIEW:
4 stars — So exactly what I was looking for at the time. Great chemistry between Mac and Maddie…enough obstacles in their way that didn’t feel forced. They each had their flaws but seemed to grow over the book. I already bought the next one in the series, so that tells you something…;)

ON REREAD:
4 stars (story) — This is just a solid romance.  I enjoyed the story, it brought me back to my years of bingeing Harlequin romances.  It’s a quick love, but I buy into it because they’re spending so much time together.  And also just because sometimes fast love stories are fun.  There were so many challenges and obstacles along the way, it really just feels like a classic romance.

I think the thing that stood out to me the most this second time through was how much emotion Mac portrays, especially near the end of the story.  You could really feel how much his life had changed upon meeting Maddie, and how devastated he was at the thought of them not working out.  The other thing I loved was the almost instant connection he formed with Thomas…even though he wasn’t really well versed in babies, you could feel that not only had he fallen in love with Maddie, but he’d truly fallen in love with her son as well.

2 stars (narration) — Oh dear.  There are two reasons the narration did NOT work for me, one which is personal taste and the other which was on the narrator.  Personal taste wise, I just did NOT like the way Ms. Fielding goes about narration.  Her style is much more close to just a person reading the words, with minimal inflection or character added to it.  I MUCH prefer the narration style where it feels like they are acting the parts.  It also makes it a lot easier to follow dialogue.  I found this style to be very bland and uninteresting…but I did learn upon reading reviews that some people prefer this style, and don’t like the more “acted” style, so this might not bother others.

But aside from all that, Ms. Fielding did not do a consistent job with her character voices — like her voices weren’t very distinct to begin with, but there was a slight difference for male vs female voices, and she would use the wrong voice in the dialogue on occasion.  When listening to a book, I rely on those slight changes to understand who’s talking (when there aren’t dialogue tags to help).  So when it’s supposed to be Maddie talking and she’s using the male voice, that’s just not cool.  I don’t understand why you wouldn’t do a retake then.  Secondly, there were odd pauses on occasion.  I rely on the pauses to denote scene changes and such, but there was the occasional pause in the middle of a paragraph.  Now, perhaps that’s down to the audiobook editor more than the narrator, but I was not impressed.

I’m quite sad, b/c Ms. Force uses Ms. Fielding to narrate the majority of the Gansett Island series, and I had been hoping to “reread” by listening to them.  But that’s just not going to happen, it wasn’t an enjoyable experience for me.