REVIEWED by Alexander

TITLE: The Burnt Toast B&B

SERIES:  Bluewater Bay novel

AUTHORS:  Heidi Belleau & Rachel Haimowicz

PUBLISHER:  Riptide Publishing

LENGTH: 6 hours, 22 minutes

NARRATORS: Dorian Bane & Tobias Silversmith

BLURB:

After breaking his arm on set, Wolf’s Landing stuntman Ginsberg Sloan finds himself temporarily out of work. Luckily, Bluewater Bay’s worst B&B has cheap long-term rates, and Ginsberg’s not too proud to take advantage of them.

Derrick Richards, a grizzled laid-off logger, inherited the B&B after his parents’ untimely deaths. Making beds and cooking sunny-side-up eggs is hardly Derrick’s idea of a man’s way to make a living, but just as he’s decided to shut the place down, Ginsberg shows up on his doorstep, pitiful and soaking wet, and Derrick can hardly send him packing.

Not outright, at least.

The plan? Carry on the B&B’s tradition of terrible customer service and even worse food until the pampered city boy leaves voluntarily. What Derrick doesn’t count on, though, is that the lousier he gets at hosting, the more he convinces bored busybody Ginsberg to try to get the B&B back on track. And he definitely doesn’t count on the growing attraction between them, or how much more he learns from Ginsberg than how to put out kitchen fires.

REVIEW:

decided to begging at the beginning (no pun intended) and address my only pet peeve about the book, which happened at the beginning.  I am useless in the kitchen, I admit it and yet scrambled eggs and toast are a no-brainer for me.  That Derrick could not manage even that at his age and after that much time trying to run the B&B frustrated me to no end.  Alright, rant over, primarily because once we get past Derrick’s total ineptitude, I started to like him.

Ginsberg on the other hand appealed to me as a character, and having met him briefly in the previous books, I felt a bit of a connection to him.  In the story, Ginsberg did no wrong, and it worked.  Considering his circumstances and personality, it was right, even when he was exhibiting “patience of a saint” behavior regarding closeted Derrick.

The overall plot felt authentic and as a result, the progression of Derrick and Ginsberg’s relationship was slow and steady, and had an appropriate amount of tension and conflict to keep things interesting, and yet the drama was never overdone (thank goodness!).  The minimal number of spoken secondary characters kept what could have been a busy story simple, and nothing was lost because of the technique.

I was excited to start this book when I saw the dual narrators, but what I got was not what I expected.  Derrick’s POV is narrated by Bane, and Silversmith took the role of Ginsberg, but they did not perform their respective characters during each other’s sections, which left me disappointed.  I also found that the flow ended up being choppy because of the direction taken, and as such, it took quite a few chapters for me to reconcile myself to the chosen style.  Honestly, I will not listen to this book again for that reason, which is sad considering I liked the story well enough.

A good story with somewhat disappointing narration, not because Bane and Silversmith did anything wrong, they just didn’t have the opportunity to do it up right.

AUDIO BOOK RATING:

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