Reviewed by Annika
TITLE: Wanted – Bad Boyfriend
SERIES: Island Classifieds #1
AUTHOR: TA Moore
NARRATOR: Michael Mola
PUBLISHER: Dreamspinner Press
LENGTH: 6 hours, 20 minutes
RELEASE DATE: February 28, 2019
BLURB:
His mother. His best friend. The barmaid at the local pub. Everyone is determined to find Nathan Moffatt a boyfriend. It’s the last thing Nathan wants. After spending every day making sure his clients experience nothing but romantic magic, the Granshire Hotel’s wedding organiser just wants to go home, binge watch crime dramas, and eat pizza in his underwear.
Unfortunately, no one believes him, and he’s stuck with lectures about dying alone. Then inspiration strikes. He needs the people in his life to want him to stay single as much as he does. He needs a bad boyfriend.
There’s only one man for the job.
Flynn Delaney is used to people on Ceremony thinking the worst of him. But he isn’t sure he wants the dubious honor of worst boyfriend on the entire island. On the other hand, if he plays along, he gets to hang out with the gorgeous Nathan and piss off the Granshire’s owners. It’s a win-win.
There’s only one problem. Flynn’s actually quite a good boyfriend, and now Nathan’s wondering if getting off the sofa occasionally is really the worst thing in the world.
REVIEW:
Nathan Moffatt has had enough. He feels like everyone he knows is trying to see him settled and tries to set him up with every gay man they come across. To make them stop he goes down the fake boyfriend route. But he’s not looking for the perfect boyfriend everyone will love, quite the opposite. He needs a boyfriend so bad everyone will be relieved when the relationship ends. As you might already have guessed, things didn’t go quite as planned.
To start, Flynn, his bad boyfriend wasn’t as bad as he had hoped, instead Flynn was everything he needed. They had chemistry and had a hard time keeping their hands off each other. I loved that both MCs were around their 40’s, they felt more settled – in a way. Then again, going down the fake boyfriend road feels, to me, like something they should have outgrown. But I do love that trope, so I’m not complaining.
I did wish for more background about Flynn especially. There were so many hints to his past. A past that basically turned the town against him. Yet no one seemed to know what it was – readers/listeners included, and we never really got to know it either, so in the end I had this feeling of incompleteness.
I normally don’t like the whole miscommunication thing, but there was one very memorable instance of a very honest and very funny miscommunication. The kid in the well. Flynn, among his many talents, also volunteers as a rescue worker and gets a call that a kid had fallen down a well. Appropriately horrified he along with the fire apartment etc races to the rescue and do not expect to find what they do. I loved everything about this event, it had me smiling and chuckling.
Michael Mola is undoubtedly a very talented narrator. He has a wide range of voices for the different characters and the pacing is spot on. I love how he lives in the story and not only read the words on his screen, it makes the story and characters come alive. The British accents were by far what I loved the most. They were plenty, and to a non-native they sounded like the real deal, he took you to UK with those accents and I could easily listen to them all day. I do wish the entire book was narrated in British though. As it was, everything that wasn’t dialogue was narrated in American English. And to me it made the story lose some of its shine, and sense of place.
All in all, this was a pleasant interlude without much fuss or muss. It’s a book to pick up when you are looking for a quick an easy listen.
RATING:
Story: 3
Narration: 4
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