Reviewed by Stephen K.
TITLE: An Unexpected Kind of Love
SERIES: When Snow Falls #1
AUTHOR: Hayden Stone
NARRATOR: Gary Furlong
PUBLISHER: Tantor Audio
LENGTH: 7 hours and 57 minutes
RELEASE DATE: February 8th 2022
BLURB:
Bookstore owner Aubrey Barnes likes his quiet, orderly London life, thank you very much. His shop may be struggling, his only employee is a menace, and his plumbing is one creaky pipe away from disaster, but he can handle it. Maybe. He cannot, however, handle the film company that’s thrown his Soho street into chaos.
And he definitely can’t handle the charismatic American actor Blake Sinclair.
Which is why he’s extremely reluctant to lease out his shop as a set for Blake’s film, but it’s his one opportunity to save his business. Now he can’t get away from the distractingly hot actor.
Then Aubrey finds himself alone with Blake in a trailer, and what happens next turns London’s heat wave into an inferno that leaves him breathless.
Aubrey is not cut out for the high-profile life of dating a celebrity, especially an American actor who’s not even out yet. Good thing their tryst is absolutely not going anywhere.
Of course, when you expect nothing, that’s exactly when it starts to mean everything.
Contains mature themes.
REVIEW:
When I first read the blurb for this I expected it to be a bit like a gay re-imagining of the film Notting Hill. I wasn’t disappointed. In fact I laughed out loud when the author took a shot at the film by referencing Hugh Grant in an early scene. However, the main character here is clearly NOT entirely a Hugh Grant character. Instead he’s a young but prematurely curmudgeonly London bookseller who meets and falls for an aspiring American actor. In some ways this is a rom/com teasing folks who love rom/coms and yet, it’s so much more. The plot involves a really great portrait of the difficulties surrounding getting back out there after the “love of your life” falls for your best friend and dumps you but still wants to remain friends with you. Now that’s not your typical M/M romance story-line.
This is clearly an M/M romance written from a man’s perspective. And while I do enjoy m/m romances written by women, this was clearly not one of those. It’s not just another cookie cutter romance pandering to the prurience of women (and men like me) who enjoy man on man action.
Whilst a mid-plot paparazzi problem came as a bit of a surprise, it also added some knowing levels of complexity to what I’d expected in the beginning to have been just a good natured lampooning of the traditional Rom/Com plot.
Given that I’m an admitted Anglophile and bibliophile this London Based romance seemed like a no-brainer to add to my must read list.
While traditional bibliophiles will enjoy this one, I actually enjoyed the audiobook version as narrated by Gary Furlong. The entire tale is told from a single character’s perspective. Furlong’s understated style should have been perfect for this. For the most part it was. But the main character here had such an active, near-continuous inner monologue, that there were points when it was unclear what had been said and what was left unspoken.
Regardless, this was one of the most pleasant surprises that I’ve found in my last few month’s reading. And despite stumbling upon this as new HOOPLA audiobook offering, I thought that the folks at LoveBytes should hear about this one as well.
RATING: 
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