Reviewed by Stephen K.
TITLE: The Nature of the Game
SERIES: Stick Side #2
AUTHOR: Amy Aislin
NARRATOR: Adam Lawrence
PUBLISHER: Amy Aislin
LENGTH: 9 hours and 21 minutes
RELEASE DATE: February 11th 2022
BLURB:
Six years ago, an ultimatum forced Dan Greyson to make a choice that cost him everything he loved most. One of those things? His boyfriend, hockey player Ashton Yager.
Now that they’ve crossed paths again, Dan isn’t about to let the opportunity slip away. Ash’s reappearance in his life is just the catalyst Dan needs to escape the rut he’s fallen into and win back Ash’s trust and love.
Ashton Yager, once burned and now a little bit shy, didn’t mean to publicly come out as bisexual. But now that he has, he’s got to deal with the consequences, including the fact that it might’ve cost him his NHL contract.
With his job on the line, he needs to keep his head down, work hard, and play the best hockey of his life. Rekindling things with Dan? That’s not exactly keeping a low profile. It’s also never going to happen, not after Dan walked away once without an explanation.
When a hurricane forces Ash to seek shelter out-of-state, he and Dan find themselves in the same B&B, where old feelings resurface. But with everything Ash has on the line, does he dare play with fire again?
REVIEW:
Jess reviewed the text version of this book when it first debuted on May 7th 2019 so I’ll try to keep the comments about the story itself to a minimum.
I do want to say that the story itself is a well crafted, charming tale. It’s one of the most genuine portraits of a second chance romance that I’ve ever encountered. The main characters are charming and more fully developed than what’s typical for M/M romance. The story itself is also more complex and multi-faceted than is common. It’s an exploration of two men deciding to try and share a life together, despite their earlier relationship having crashed & burned. It’s also a tale of forgiveness and regaining trust after having been hurt by the person one trusted.
It also has one of the funniest “first time” sex scenes I’ve ever encountered. These two, (both basically straight) guys attempting penetrative m/m sex for the first time is presented in a laugh out loud funny manner. It’s made all the sweeter in that while there’s plenty of bumbling, the guys clearly are having fun as well. Then there’s the worst mother since Medea. While she’s not in many scenes, the influence of this vile creature is in some ways the prime mover in this book. (Her behavior is somewhat explained in book 1 but it’s not really relevant to the tale at hand)
This tale is romantic, sweet and endearing, but not perfect. The characters are both charming and the story is well told overall. But (for me) there were two flaws that need mentioning. One, a pet peeve of mine, and the the second a bit of uninformed authorship. Neither ruins the story, but it COULD have been so much better if the flaws hadn’t been there.
The first involves unbelievable six year failure of communication. Over 200 years ago, in Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen created the quintessential resolution to the a lover’s tiff. She had Darcy write an explanatory letter to Elizabeth Bennet. It continually bothers me when authors today create a crisis due to some incomplete, incorrect, or just dishonest communication. Countless fictional characters spend unnecessary eons in ignorance and agony when lazy writers resort to this tired, trite cliche. With all the means of communication we have at our disposal today, the uncommunicative ex is just not character that I ever find believable or appealing. Even in the film Casablanca amidst Nazis, and World War II and 1940s communication, the couple hadn’t left it hanging longer than a year or so.
Second, is very trivial and that’s the hurricane that is a significant plot element in the book. I’ve lived in the Tampa Bay area and have endured a number of major storms. The hurricane precautions and the weather warnings in this story were just too over the top, and the after-effects of the hurricane were not at all realistic, and certainly not consistent. The author should have spent a bit more time researching how these things play out if she was going to include it in the book. The inaccuracies don’t destroy the real story here. But they are like an annoying mosquito, always buzzing around and drawing attention away from what I’d rather be focusing on.
That said I really enjoyed the story overall.If I were rating just the text version this would be a five.
Unfortunately, the text was stronger than the audio presentation.
Their are actually several problems… Adam Lawrence is a somewhat inexperienced narrator (4 books to his credit?) and he does tend to use the same voice level throughout. The tone and pace of his narration sometimes created a cognitive dissonance with the book’s text (particularly in the earlier parts).
The art of storytelling requires a certain facility with dramatic pauses that Adam hasn’t quite mastered yet. While it’s not terribly obvious to a casual listener, I was curious, and checked out the text version as well. Several section were much clearer in the text than what one hears listening to the audio-book. This did seem worse at the outset of the book. Toward the end of the book, I’d acclimated enough to not notice it as much.
There was also a disconnect between the apparent mood of the characters, as evidenced by the text, and the mood as voiced by the narrator. Ash’s character voice is both the best and the worst parts of this audio-book. This hulking hockey-player character IS a bit larger than life occasionally. Sometimes he adopts a buffoonish demeanor. Unfortunately that was used in both his dialogue and in his internal monologue.
While the clod-pated characterization works GREAT in some spots, it’s over-used in the audio. It really detracts when Ash is being more serious and adult. Introspective moments, that should have been poignant, sometimes ended up having a cartoonish feel that detracted, rather than adding to the overall experience.
The book is formatted in the common, alternating POV style, with sections from Dan’s POV, and sections from Ash’s POV. With only one narrator though, this often gets garbled and a bit confused.
There’s also an issue in that the character voices are often quite similar. It’s sometimes difficult to know exactly who is speaking. Of course, the text version had the advantage of intra-chapter text divider emojis. That doesn’t translate to the audio version. This might have worked better as a dual-narration book. Although here the swaps in POV often occurred intra-chapter rather than being in the alternating chapter style making that difficult as well.
Personal taste in book narrators does vary widely. The best way to decide might be to listen to the audio sample and judge for yourself.
In summary, if this is the type of book that you’d normally read, I’d recommend the text version over the audio. However, if this is the type of title that you’d only ever listen to, the audio version does still work quite well. It’s just not as elegant as the text version.
RATING: 
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