Reviewed by Annika

TITLE: Surreal Estate

AUTHOR: Jesi Lea Ryan

NARRATOR: TJ Clark

PUBLISHER: Riptide Publishing

LENGTH: 7 hours, 30 minutes

RELEASE DATE: February 11, 2020

BLURB:

Sasha Michaels is a psychic with an affinity for houses. And he’s homeless. Go figure. After months of sleeping rough, he stumbles upon an abandoned house, and the lonely place beckons him inside. He’s finally safe…until someone comes blundering in to his hideaway.

House flipper Nick Cooper lost everything in the recession. Desperate to revive his business, he turns to a loan shark to fund his comeback project: flipping an abandoned house full of potential. But it turns out the house has an unexpected occupant.

Nick and Sasha make a deal: Sasha can stay, in exchange for helping with the renovation. To both of their surprise, the closer they get to the loan shark’s due date, the stronger grows their feelings for each other. Problem is, Nick isn’t the only one with feelings for Sasha, and now, the house doesn’t want to let Sasha go.

REVIEW:

I’ve read numerous of books with various types of psychics before, I’m partial to the trope. But this take on it was new and really interesting.

Sasha has an affinity for houses. They speak to him – in a way. They show him memories, good and bad. But they also affect him on a physical level. His life used to be solid, but trusting the wrong people caused him to not only lose his money and the band he played in, it also cost him going to college and even having a place to stay. So when an abandoned house beckons him inside, he listens. Little did he know that the house had plans for him. Not in any nefarious way, it had just made up its mind about the next resident and it did not include being sold first chance the new owner and house-flipper Nick Cooper got.

At times I felt like the story and the ideas behind certain things were underdeveloped. The ideas were great and I really wanted to know more. Do this deep dive into the thick of things. Most ideas were explained and explored to a certain point, it wasn’t shallow by any means, but it also wasn’t quite cohesive. We jumped from one thing to the next, without really finishing it. Take Sasha’s gift as an example, I loved this take on psychic ability. That houses had memories and feelings. And I really wanted to know more about it. I think the author could have done so much more with Sasha’s gift, exploring it more.

The pacing of this book didn’t feel quite right, there was no real flow to the book. It almost felt like many separate events thrown together in he hopes of forming a story. They were only loosely connected and many left open ended. Now, normally this would be the perfect premise for the beginning of a series. But it wasn’t those kinds of loose ends – for the most part. And while I do think this was interesting world Ryan created, and I’m very fascinated by the whole house psychic thing, I’m also very satisfied with reading this one book.

There was this strange mix of never ending drama unfolding one after the next. But the way this book was written it never felt overly dramatic, which I greatly appreciate. I am not a fan of drama for the sake of it. On the other hand there was no consequences for what happened either, no real impact, for the characters or me as a listener. Things that should have some kind of reaction or repercussion never had. Once the scene ended, the topic was closed never to be brought up again. That works for some things, but there were some major events here that I felt should have impacted a lot more. Every ingredient is there for a great story, it was just slightly off

Surreal Estate was narrated by TJ Clark, another first for me. His narration was my second favourite thing about this book, the first one being Sasha’s affinity of houses. He was widely talented and his narration held a good pacing and his various voices enhanced the story. He captured the different personalities of the characters, from Sasha and Nicky to the more slimy Frank Diamond. I loved the concept and narration of this story and I’m glad I gave it a try – for nothing else to explore Sasha’s talent and finding a new narrator to look out for.

RATING:

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