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My Review:Title: Crime and Periodicals
Author: Nora Everly
Series: Green Valley Library #2
Published by: Smartypants Romance
Release Date: November 5, 2019
Format: Audiobook
Narrator: Chris Brinkley, Reagan Boggs
Length: 8 hours and 3 minutes
Genres: Contemporary, Romance
Source: Authors Direct
Reading Challenges: Lenoreo's 2020 Audiobook Challenge, Lenoreo's 2020 Beat the Backlist Challenge
Find it: Goodreads ✩ Amazon ✩ Google ✩ Kobo ✩ iTunes ✩ Authors Direct
My rating:
Blurb:In Green Valley, Tennessee everybody knows everybody, but nobody knows Sabrina Logan.
Sabrina has been hiding in plain sight for years. Living her life inside of books, dutifully helping her family, and hoping no one will notice her. So far? Mission accomplished!
Yet when sexy—and distrustful—sheriff, Wyatt Monroe returns to town with his daughters, he definitely notices the quiet librarian everyone else overlooks. The single dad can’t seem to shake thoughts of shy Sabrina. Without quite understanding the impulse, Wyatt makes his mission finding her again, so he can . . . well, he’ll just have to reckon with that later.
What Wyatt discovers is a woman who trusts too easily, but who’s afraid to live. Trust doesn’t come easily to Wyatt. But living? That’s never been a problem.
And he’d sure like to show her how.
'Crime and Periodicals' is a full-length contemporary romantic comedy, can be read as a standalone, and is book #2 in the Green Valley Library series, Green Valley World, Penny Reid Book Universe.
2.5 stars — *sigh* This was not a bad book per se. But I think the narration magnified the flatness of this story. I bet I would have enjoyed it more if I’d read it (though I doubt it would be a fave even then).
I’ve enjoyed the male narrator before, and he was pretty solid in this one as well. Unfortunately at least 2/3 of this book is in the heroine’s POV, and I just wasn’t as big a fan of her narration. She had an adorable accent, but otherwise she was very meh for me. Maybe less than meh. The problem is that she wasn’t a narrator whose style was completely unacted (I never remember the name). She did try to act. But I didn’t always agree with her choices of how to emote the words, if that makes any sense. She was very flat in her performance, and it kind of made it boring. I don’t really know how to describe it, it just didn’t work for me. I also really wasn’t a fan of when she would laugh when it would say someone would laugh…I’ve never encountered that before. It’s one thing to put an emotional quality in your voice, but it felt like adding.
The real problem is that the story isn’t very action-packed. It’s not very fast paced, or with a lot of conflict that drives up interest and anxiety, etc. So the story itself fell kind of flat for me. I didn’t really connect with Sabrina that well, which is funny, because I totally expected to. It’s not that she wasn’t interesting, seeing how her shyness had crippled her, and how the death of her sister basically just amplified her shyness as a coping mechanism. But there was a LOT of time spent with her trying to overcome those tendancies, and they felt drawn out. It’s an interesting affliction, but I think it took her a whole chapter of self-motivation to go into a bar and order chicken. I feel like that could have been condensed somehow. It also made it so that her change seemed a lot faster and maybe a touch more unbelievable. I’m not sure I always got where her motivation came from, it just sort of happened to coincide with Wyatt. *shrugs*
Wyatt was a case of too good to be true. He was sweet and adorable, but he was kinda flat in his own right. I almost expected more to happen with the ex, but it didn’t.
They were really cute together, but I checked out while listening to so much of it, I didn’t even get into the steamy scenes. Again, that might be mostly the narrator.
I think the theme of my reading experience is that I expected stuff to happen, and it didn’t.
I’ve seen a lot of readers mention they enjoyed the kids…and they were cute and fun. But — again — I had to listen to the narrator’s children’s voices, and I’m just not a fan of that…I’m not a kid person really, and this kind of grated on that nerve (with the childish affectation of pronunciation, etc).
*sigh* I honestly only pushed through because I have an ARC of Everett’s book, and once I started I felt like I needed to get to the end. But that was probably highly unnecessary. My recommendation is if you’re going to read this book, perhaps skip the audio version…or at least listen to the sample and see what you think (though my problems actually just got more pronounced over time, so not sure if the sample would be enough).
Ugh. Sorry this one was such a disappointment.