Reviewed by Stephen K.
TITLE: The Blinding Light
AUTHOR: Renae Kaye
NARRATOR: Jonathan Young
PUBLISHER: Dreamspinner Press LLC
LENGTH: 6 Hours and 56 Min
RELEASE DATE: March 26, 2015
BLURB:
Jake Manning’s smart mouth frequently gets him into trouble. Because of it he can’t hold a job. Combined with some bad luck, it’s prevented him from keeping steady employment. A huge debt looms over him, and alone he shoulders the care of his alcoholic mother and three younger sisters. When a housekeeping position opens, Jake’s so desperate he leaps at the opportunity. On landing, he finds his new boss, Patrick Stanford, a fussy, arrogant, rude…and blind man.
Born without sight, Patrick is used to being accommodated, but he’s met his match with Jake, who doesn’t take any of his crap and threatens to swap all the braille labels on his groceries and run off with his guide dog unless he behaves.
Jake gets a kick out of Patrick. Things are looking up: The girls are starting their own lives, and his mum’s sobriety might stick this time. He’s sacrificed everything for his family; maybe it’s time for him to live his life and start a relationship with Patrick. When his mother needs him, guilt makes his choice between family and Patrick difficult, and Jake must realize he’s not alone anymore.
REVIEW:
I decided to try this one after listening to The Shearing Gun yet again. Whilst the text version of this was reviewed over 10 years ago, I felt that a review of the audiobook was long overdue.
It’s almost 10 years old now, but it’s a sweet tale of Jake, a youngish Aussie bloke who’s taken a job as an agency housekeeper for an impossible to please client. Jake is in dire financial straits due to having to raise and support 3 kid sisters and tend to an alcoholic mom. His real financial problem is in paying back a bank loan that he got in order to retire a gambling debt that his mom had run up during an alcoholic gambling binge with some disreputable people.
As impossible as it sounds, this is mostly a happy go lucky tale as Jake is irrepressible and says what’s on his mind. The relationship that he develops with the repressed and overly formal Patrick is adorable.
I love that Jake is as loud and unfiltered as he is. I love his dynamic with his family and with his mates and especially with Patrick.
I was pleasantly surprised by the mom’s solar system analogy where she likens Jake to a planet needing a sun to orbit around and it really set up the ending of the book well. I also loved that blind one in this couple here is the main breadwinner. Yes, he was adopted and has inherited enough to keep him comfortably but he still got himself a doctorate in Chemistry and even found himself a well paying job in the commercial sector that he’s ideally suited for.
I’m also still enjoying learning things about Aussie culture. I learned that “op-shop” is an Aussie term for a thrift/charity shop. That’s a term I’d never heard before, and I worked for a number of years with a bunch of Aussies. Given that it’s an election year in the USA, I also liked the casual mention of Australia’s system of ranked choice voting. This is a system that I’ve felt the USA could use for years now, and here it’s mentioned as being the accepted norm in a book from 10 years ago!
Jonathan Young narrates this audiobook. He’s a narrator that I’d not been familiar with before, but he does an admirable job with the narration. He’s got that distinctive Australian accent and his pacing is excellent. He readily captures the “smart mouthed” quality that is so vital to the character of Jake. Since the book is presented from a single point of view, the demand for other voices is somewhat limited, but he does a great job with the chances he gets.
I tend to read/listen mostly for pleasure these days and this book and the characters within were a pleasure to spend time with. I’ll definitely be adding this one to my frequent listening rotation.
RATING: 
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