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I just finished 'Naughty in Nice' by Rhys Bowen. It is the 5th book in the Royal Spyness series. I really enjoy this series set in 1933 about this 22 year old girl who is 34th in line for the British throne, but virtual broke because her father squandered the family fortune before killing himself and leaving his children saddled with onerous death taxes. The books all feel very similar and I wouldn't recommend reading them one after another. But listening to one every six to nine months is like seeing an old friend again.
Perhaps the best thing about this series is the narrator, Katherine Kellgren. She simply brings the story to life with distinct voices for every character that are consistent from book to book and she brings such a feeling of enthusiasm to each book.
I enjoyed her reading so much I went looking specifically for other things she has narrated and she has a really long list at audible.com, something like 8 pages of entries. I settled on 'Sophomore Switch' by Abby McDonald about two girls who exchange schools for a semester - one having gone to Oxford and the other to UC Santa Barbara. It is a light, fluffy fish-out-of-water story. I am only couple of hours into it, but I am enjoying it so far. This is the kind of 'turn off your brain' story I frequently enjoy during my commute.
Before that I listened to 'Mila 2.0' by Debra Driza. I stuck with it to the end, so I'm only going to give it a small thumbs down rather than a big one. It is the story of an android who at the beginning thinks she is a real 16 year old girl and over the course of the story has to come to grips with being an android. I'm a sci-fi geek, so I liked the concept. Unfortunately, the execution was terrible. Enough said.
And before that, I listened to the first book in 'The Lying Game' series by Sara Shepard. I've been watching the tv show version on ABCFamily and really love the show, so I thought I would try the book. While all the same characters are in both, and they have the same personalities, the basic plot is somewhat different. And I think I like the tv shows variation better. Plus the book had the added disadvantage of being narrated by Cassandra Morris, one of my least favorite narrators. She uses this whiny young girl voice that sounds about 12 years old that I hate. She has also narrated the 'Pretty Little Liars' series and I pretty much gave up on those book strictly because of her. So I doubt I will listen to any more books in The Lying Game series.
Duane
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