Reviewed by Larissa
TITLE: Mr. Important
SERIES: Honeybridge, Book 2
AUTHOR: Lucy Lennox and May Archer
NARRATOR: Michael Dean
PUBLISHER: Thicket Productions LLC
LENGTH: 11 hours and 47 minutes
RELEASE DATE: March 13, 2024
BLURB:
One New Year’s masquerade. One anonymous hookup. One billionaire-sized mistake.
Once upon a time, someone looked at my scrawny, impetuous eight-year-old self and nicknamed me Mr. Important… and I believed them.
That was my first mistake.
Two decades, a dozen failed careers, and a thousand meaningless hookups later, I’ve made more mistakes than I can count. My parents have decided I’m purely decorative, my brother thinks I need pep talks, and the gorgeous billionaire who hired me as a favor to my dad? He’s forgotten I exist.
So I’m done with mistakes.
Call it my New Year’s resolution. From now on, I’m going after what I want… starting with the mysterious silver fox in the Roman warrior mask who approached me at the charity gala and offered me a scorching, anonymous one-night stand.
Unfortunately, when our masks come off I realize mistakes are not done with me.
Because the bossy guy who blew my mind? He’d thought I was someone else. Worse than that, he’s my father’s friend. A supposedly-straight workaholic. The person I’m stuck on a road trip with for the next two weeks. And, oh yeah, my actual boss.
The farther we get from New York, the closer we become, and the harder it is to pretend I’m not falling for him. But I can’t see how someone as brilliant, controlled, and successful as Thatcher Pennington would risk everything to be with someone like me… even if he makes me feel like I’m finally Mr. Important.
REVIEW:
Mr. Important continues Lucy Lennox and May Archer’s small-town love stories centered on the Honeycutt and Wellbridge families of Honeybridge, Maine. Notably, most of this book takes place away from Honeybridge, but never fear, it’s always there in the background. While the small-town vibe isn’t quite as strong as in the first book, Firecracker, it’s still there and I loved it just the same.
Reagan, aka Mr. Important, and Thatcher have been attracted to each other in secret for years. Reagan thinks of himself as a screw-up who could never catch the eye of an uber-successful businessman and entrepreneur like Thatcher. Since Thatcher is friends with Reagan’s father, Thatcher would probably always see him as a kid anyway, and his father – who Reagan is constantly trying (and failing) to impress – would likely have an aneurysm if he found out that Regan was 1) gay and 2) involved with Thatcher.
Thatcher, not surprisingly, gets hung up on the age gap between him and Reagan and that he’s his friend’s son and his employee. But more notably, he falls into the trap of taking outward appearances at face value and writing off Reagan as the flighty, unreliable failure his father constantly describes him as. But one serendipitous, pseudo-anonymous hookup later and things change.
The romance between Reagan and Thatcher is captivating and I found myself easily drawn to both characters. The authors plausibly demonstrate how effortlessly these two men slot into each other’s lives despite all the reasons they couldn’t or shouldn’t. The subplot is pretty obvious to everyone except the characters in the story, but it works effectively as a vehicle to propel the relationship development. Reagan and Thatcher have undeniable chemistry and the injection of hurt/comfort into the story is seriously swoon-worthy.
Like the Firecracker audiobook before it, the audiobook of Mr. Important is substantial, with almost twelve hours of listening time. That’s a very good thing when you have a terrific story being told by an immensely talented narrator like Lennox and Archer’s go-to vocal performer, Michael Dean. The synergy between Dean’s interpretation of the story and the authors’ intentions for the characters and the scenes is evident – familiarity borne from repeat collaboration, and we reap the rewards. Dean breathes life into Lennox and Archer’s sweet, sexy, low-angst love stories and he captures the quirkiness, eccentricities, and found family elements of the small town of Honeybridge and its residents, and is spot on in his delivery of the witty banter, humor, sexual tension, and emotional connection throughout the story. Dean doesn’t read a story, he acts it out like theater.
Overall, Mr. Important fits squarely within the authors’ wheelhouse, and I was happy to be back in one of their charming fictional worlds wrapped up in a lovely romance between two well-drawn, charismatic characters, all brought to life in technicolor through Michael Dean’s vocal performance. Highly recommended.
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