Reviewed by Stephen K
TITLE: Unbreak Me
AUTHOR: Maria Vickers
NARRATOR: Andrew Joseph Perez
PUBLISHER: Self-Published
LENGTH: 6 Hours 13 Minutes
RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2021
BLURB:
They were supposed to be together forever. That was the plan, but through a cruel twist of fate the night before their three-year anniversary, Tex Davis lost the one man he would ever love, Memphis King. A year has passed and he still hasn’t been able to move on. Everyone tells him it’s time, but what do they know? Memphis was his partner in love and life. Losing him broke Tex.
Tex has been given an opportunity to move from New York to Seattle. His friends and family are encouraging him to take it, but he has already decided to decline the offer because that would mean leaving Memphis behind.
Then something happened.
Whether it be fate or something else, Memphis came back to him. Tex’s first love is supposed to help him move on, but not even Memphis can bring himself to force Tex to let him go.
Is it so wrong to want to spend forever with the person you loved most? Both hearts are begging to be unbroken.
REVIEW:
Audio-books tend to amplify both the good and the bad in written tales. In this case, the chapters dealing with Tex’s overwhelming grief seemed to go on and on beyond what seemed reasonable. And having the character complain that people are telling him that his grief will lessen and that he must move on (when I was thinking the exact same thing) actually caused me to chuckle.
Perhaps this would have been less of an issue if we knew more about the couple before Memphis’s death. I love to fully envision in my head a story that I’m reading, as it unfolds – even more so an audio-book. That was made difficult here. I knew so little about the main characters. Who was older? What were their comparative builds? What did they do in their together time when they were both alive? How did they generally relate? We’re told repeatedly that Memphis was Tex’s split apart and yet we’re not really shown that aspect of their relationship, either pre- or post-mortem.
Moreover, we’re given very little detail that helps get us emotionally invested in liking either of the characters. All we get at the outset is a heated argument (based on an unexplained misunderstanding) followed by six chapters of keening before the relationship details start to be filled in.
I sometimes get really tired of modern authors’ perceived need to hook us with climactic action before even introducing us to their characters. Can they not realize that we’ll care more about people we’ve come to know a bit? Knowing more about the characters also facilitates showing over telling. And I, like most readers, find being shown something immeasurably more interesting than being told about it. It’s often the little inconsequential details of a tale that provide the hooks that snare a reader’s interest. When climactic action occurs too quickly the author hasn’t had the time necessary to set those hooks.
This story also violates some of the conventions of para-normal fiction in ways that don’t really add to the tale. As a ghost, Memphis seemed entirely too “normal” and not nearly enough “para.” Memphis can be much more corporeal than what one usually finds in ghost stories. Memphis’s ability to so closely approach his former corporeal self undermines the whole grief aspect of the story. (Particularly when apparently he can still be the penetrative partner in anal sex with his widower.) Also jarring to me was Memphis being described as having bodily reactions when in theory at any rate he’s no longer in a body. Can someone still take your breath away when you are no longer breathing?
But more importantly, how can Tex go right back to bewailing his separation from Memphis after just having sex with what is apparently a full-body apparition of him?
Andrew Joseph Perez does a wonderful job in reading the book in what appears to be his maiden outing as a book narrator. His overall pacing is good, the tenor of the dialogue varies enough to easily identify which character is speaking and non of the characters, male or female come off as being poorly acted.
RATING: 
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