CBR16 Book 11: "Canadian Boyfriend" by Jenny Holiday

Page count: 384 pages

Audio book length: 10 hrs 52 mins

Rating: 4 stars

This was an audio ARC from Netgalley. My opinions are my own.

CBR16 Sweet Books: Exciting (I've been looking forward to this for a long time, and was VERY excited to get an ARC shortly before the release date. 

Nowhere Bingo: A book with multiple POVs

When Aurora "Rory" Evans was a lonely teenager, she ran into a handsome Canadian hockey player while she was selling coffee at the Mall of America. She took his name and pretended to have an actual Canadian boyfriend, making her loneliness and ostracism seem more bearable, because even if she had been invited to things, she wouldn't have been able to come, since she was probably visiting her boyfriend, in Canada. And obviously, he couldn't come to school dances or her ballet recitals, living in Canada and all. To keep up the ruse, she also wrote her fictional boyfriend long letters, basically making them a sort of journal for some difficult years in her life.

Now an adult, having given up on ballet as it was making her sick, Aurora works as a dance teacher in a small town. She still struggles with her years of disordered eating, and occasionally gets panic attacks, but she's doing a lot better and enjoys teaching children the joys of dance. To her great surprise, the tragically widowed Mike Martin, whose daughter comes back to dance classes after some time away (what with the grief and the dead mum and soforth), is none other than the handsome young man she took as inspiration for her fake boyfriend. To her credit, it takes her a while to confirm to herself that the Mike she met as a teenager and this Mike are the same person, but even when she does, she doesn't tell him the truth about her teenage coping mechanism. 

Mike loved his wife and is still dealing with a lot of emotions after her sudden death in a car accident. Olivia, Rory's dance student, is his step-daughter and while he's the only father she's ever known, he's had to fight his parents-in-law for custody, which hasn't exactly made the grieving process easier. It's clear that Olivia adores her father, but she's also a tween who lost her mother and is prone to tantrums and sudden outbursts. Dance classes with "Miss Rory" are one of her favourite things. Mike likes that Aurora doesn't fawn over him (unlike many of the dance mums) and he sees the easy rapport she has with Olivia, and when he discovers that Aurora is working multiple jobs to make ends meet, offers to hire her to be Olivia's sort-of nanny while he's off resuming his hockey career. 

So the romance here takes a while to develop. Aurora is keeping the secret that she basically used Mike as a template for a fantasy boyfriend for a long time as a teenager, a truth that becomes more difficult to tell the longer she knows him and the closer they become. Mike is also Aurora's employer (she refuses to take a paycheck, but lives in his basement, has access to a car whenever she needs it, and gets health insurance) for a lot of the book, which certainly complicates the situation between them somewhat. Mike also feels like he can't date again until his daughter is older, possibly even until after she's old enough to move out. He doesn't feel like he can introduce a new woman into her life, in case they break up and she would have to deal with losing another person. When they do finally decide to become more than friends, they do address the employer/employee complication, so it's very much not a case of anyone being exploited or taken advantage of. 

There's so much to like in this book. The close friendship between Aurora and her best friend (who owns the dance studio where she works). Mike has been in therapy since his wife died, and once Aurora gets health insurance, she can also afford to see a therapist. She has a long list of reasons as to why she needs to, beginning with the relationship with her very controlling mother, who still makes her feel guilty for giving up a career as a dancer, because of all the time and money her mother put into "supporting" her daughter. There's the disordered eating, which still creates problems for her occasionally, although I liked how she tried to get more comfortable with allowing herself sugary things and her anxiety. And after a while, it's actually her complicated feelings about her relationship with Mike. 

By the way, notice how I keep calling the male protagonist simply Mike in my review? My major complaint about this book, the main reason I cannot give it five stars, even though I really enjoyed it and it did so many things well, is that consistently, throughout the entire book, up to and including the epilogue, Aurora calls Mike by his full name. He is Mike Martin EVERY single time she refers to him. I get it when they are still just acquaintances, and he's the father of one of the girls she teaches. But once she moves into his house to take care of his daughter? Once they actually start engaging in spicy recreational activities? Why? Who does that? 

I do not call or think of my husband as Mark Patterson, he's just Mark. Possible exception if I have to fill out official paperwork or something, then I guess I'd use his full name. Why, Aurora? What is your deal? What is up with that? This strange quirk started bothering me about halfway through the book when I really started noticing it, and by the end of the book, I was annoyed enough that it made me want to scream. So no five stars for you, book. 

It's been a while since I listened to an audio book with two narrators, but to me, this had an unusual audio format. I'm used to romance novels that have alternating POVs between the protagonists, and if the audiobook has two different narrators, they read the entire chapter from "their" character's POV. That is not the case here. Emily Ellet narrates the chapters where Aurora is the POV character and Joshua Jackson narrates Mike's. In all the chapters, Ellet does all the female voices and Jackson does all the male voices. So it becomes a sort of hybrid between a standard audio book and an audio drama. I really liked it. I've now come across another romance audio that did the same thing. If this is a new trend in dual-POV books in audio, whether romance or not, I'm a big fan. It makes the whole thing a lot more entertaining. 

Both narrators for this are really good and make the story more engaging. Normally, I only listen to audiobooks when I'm going to and from work, or am out doing errands, or if I'm doing chores. Now, I kept finding excuses to listen more. I know there was a lot of excitement on social media because THE  Joshua Jackson (of Dawson's Creek and Fringe fame) was doing the male part. Is this actually his first time doing audiobooks? If so, he did a good job. I enjoyed the audiobook enough that I used one of my precious Audible credits on it once I finished listening. So even if this was an ARC originally, Ms. Holiday got another sale.

Niggles about Aurora's weird name quirk aside, this was really good and I liked how Mike's character actually got the space and time to work through his many issues because of his wife's death. Neither Aurora nor Mike are magically healed by the love of another, and keep going to therapy because even once they work through the final act complications, both of them need mental health support. In so many books, one or both of the main characters should have intense and comprehensive therapy to deal with their MANY issues - that is not the case here.

I think the next book in the series is about Gretchen, Aurora's best friend. I can't wait. Hopefully, she'll not refer to her romantic partner with first and surname constantly. 

Judging a book by its cover: By now, I can pretty much recognise a Leni Kaufmann-illustrated cover at a glance. I always love her covers, and this one is particularly cute. Not entirely sure why the guy (clearly Mike) looks like the twin of Andy Dwyer from Parks and Recreation, but the pink and the mint-green and Aurora's lovely ballet slippers - the playful way she sits and glances over at Mike. It works for me on every level. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR6 Book 136: "Zoya" by Danielle Steel

Page count: 512 pages
Rating: 3.5 stars

Zoya Ossupov, a young noblewoman, second cousin to the Tsar himself, lives a sheltered life of luxury in St. Petersburg. When the revolution breaks out, Zoya´s grandmother, who has seen which way the wind was blowing, bundles up the many garments they´ve sown jewellery into and Zoya and they flee the country through Finland. Having lost her father, mother and elder brother in only a few days and worrying about the safety of her cousins the Romanovs, who were placed in house arrest by the revolutionaries, Zoya has to make a new life for herself in Paris with her grandmother and the one loyal servant who came with them.

Going against the express wishes of her stately grandmother, Zoya auditions with the Ballet Russe and starts supporting their little family as a ballet dancer. The only other money they have is the pittance they can get from selling their family heirlooms, in a market already flooded with Russian treasures. Zoya rejects the elderly Russian prince and the young lodger that her grandmother tries to match her with. Her grandmother wants her to be safe, Zoya wants to marry for love. She falls for an American officer, but he´s old enough to be her father and believes she would be better off without him. Only towards the end of the first World War he realises that they cannot fight their attraction, and Zoya becomes a society darling in New York.

She´s blissfully happy until the Wall Street crash, suddenly widowed with two small children to support. Once again, Zoya´s willingness to work hard sees her safe and comfortable within a few years, and eventually she even finds love again. Then the second World War arrives, and both Zoya´s new husband and son are determined to fight for their country. Will another conflict cost her more of the people she loves?

I´m pretty sure that this is the first novel I´ve ever read by Danielle Steel, and having read it, I can see both why her books are incredibly popular among some readers, and completely panned by others. I´m not going to pretend that I thought this was great literature, some of the descriptions and info dumping was a bit heavy handed and the plot was possibly a bit too packed, but it was an entertaining book and it reminded me that I´ve always found the Romanov family and their fate fascinating (even before I watched Anastasia. So it´s spurred me to add two non-fiction books about them to my TBR list and they will be part of my reading list for CBR7.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR6 Book 61: "A Company of Swans" by Eva Ibbotson

Page count: 384 pages
Rating: 4 stars

Eighteen year old Harriet Morton lives with her stuffy professor father and strict and joyless aunt in Cambridge. Her only chance to escape the drudgery of her life is through books or the weekly ballet lessons that her father inexplicably lets her take. When she is offered a position with a travelling ballet troupe going to perform Swan Lake in a remote city up the Amazon river, but denied permission by her father, she rebels and runs away.

When the troupe arrive in Manaus in South America, Harriet has become fully accepted among the dancers of the troupe, and even the prima ballerina, Madame Simonova is impressed with her self-effacing good nature and her work ethic. While she's neither particularly pretty or vivacious, she's loyal and kind and catches the eye of Rom Verney, probably the richest man in Manaus. She tries to persuade him to go home to England to take care of his family estate, Stavely Hall, and his young nephew, not realising the intricacies of the family drama that made Verney leave and go into exile in the Amazon in the first place.

There are complications when Harriet's would-be fiancee arrives, sent by her angry father, to take her back to England. Verney's recently widowed sister-in-law also arrives to woo him back to England, and is none to happy to see the man she intends to charm, captivated by a young nobody from a ballet company.

Which Witch was one of my favourite books as a child and I was delighted when I discovered that Ibbotson had written a number of romances for Young Adults. The romance in this book is fairly innocent as these things go, although I was very amused to see some reviewers on Goodreads appalled because there is pre-marital sex in the book (all of it between chapters), and that Harriet seems to suddenly alter her personality from a good, responsible and chaste young lady to someone who will willingly let herself be seduced, revelling in becoming a fallen woman. I felt that the development of Harriet's character was really well done, and while she's so good and kind and sweet that you almost want to hate her - she seems to make herself a favourite of everyone around her, with the notable exception of Verney's sister-in-law, you can't really dislike her, because she had such a sucky upbringing in such a joyless home. She's also a bit too naive for her own good, and has painfully low self-esteem. She should be much better at speaking up for herself. The fact that she's rather timid and quite plain, looks-wise also keeps her from falling into Mary Sue territory. I always like romances where the plain and quiet girl gets the hero.

Verney is wonderfully dramatic and it's no surprise that Harriet falls in love with him. I don't see how she couldn't. He's rich, handsome, extremely charming and showers her with attention. He tries to help her with when the horrible young man her father and aunt want her to marry comes to steal her back to England and once he realises that she's an innocent treats Harriet so honourably that she pretty much has to throw herself at him to get him into bed. Running away to realise her dreams and falling in love helps Harriet take proper control of her own life. She still has to be rescued towards the end, but it's so charmingly done, and her father and aunt are so horrible, that the whole thing felt a bit like a fairy tale, with Verney as the dashing prince, charging into the metaphorical tower to reclaim his princess.

The book was very sweet and an entertaining read. There's a few too many very happy coincidences of people ending up in the same place at the same time, as well as some rather convoluted misunderstandings to create obstacles for the happy couple of the "why don't you just actually TALK to one another?" variety, but it all works out well in the end. I will absolutely be looking for more of these.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.