Julia Whelan

Juilliard-trained actress Sewanee Chester is an audiobook narrator whose best friend, Adaku, has achieved the stardom they both dreamed of, before an accident took one of Swan's eyes. Now, Swan has been offered an unusually lucrative deal to co-narrate the late romance author June French's last project with Brock McKnight. Swan doesn't do romance anymore, but agrees to do the job because it will help pay for her grandmother's move from assisted living to a memory care unit. And when Swan show more (under her pen name) and Brock McKnight (also a pen name, obviously) begin working together - and texting - they have a connection. But then, at the Audie awards, they discover each other's true identities: months ago, they hooked up at a book conference in Vegas. Can the two (four?) of them reconcile all their identities, and can Sewanee accept herself for who she is now, instead of seeing herself as a damaged version of who she was?

Loved this for the humor (I laughed out loud several times), the friendship between Sewanee and Adaku, the romance ("Alice" and Nick, Swan and "Brock"), and the peek into the world of audiobook narration. show less

This is a super meta-romance-audiobook and I loved it. The lead characters are both audiobook romance narrators so they know all the tropes and can't believe that they're actually living them. Julia Whelan does a great job giving us a satisfactory love story while mostly avoiding cliches (or at least winking at them) and digging deeper into what makes romance a popular and necessary genre.

Subplots include: grandparent with dementia, Hollywood fame, disability caused by an accident, What show more Happens in Vegas show less

this is a near perfect romance novel. there was one little bump (for me) about 90% of the way in, and she actually addressed it later, so maybe it wasn't a bump after all. this is extremely well written, actually funny (i had to pause the narration a few times i was laughing so hard), mixes and matches so many of the tropes so beautifully, and is also about more than romance. it's also about what it's like to lose yourself and whether it's possible or not to get that person back, when show more they're changed. this is both for the main character, her love interest, and her grandmother (who has dementia and so physically can't get herself back, so what it's like to lose herself over time). i loved learning a little about what audio narration is really like, and honestly never thought that dual narrators collaborated at all, that it was all just done in the production. but that was just fun added bonus for me.

this book just shines. brava. show less

Great fun and a lot of laughs! One instance of too much information in a sex scene, but otherwise lovely. I was just about to get annoyed with Sewanee when she didn't seem to get how in love Nick was, but the author deftly departed from that line and caught me up again as Swan moved forward, not staying stuck (thank heavens!). Thanks, Marilyn, for pointing this one out to me. I, too, liked the inside look at audiobook production. The author made a wonderful narrator and her afterward was show more entertaining also. show less