The Romance

Daughters of Mannerling, Book 5

By: M. C. Beaton

Narrated by: Charlotte Anne Dore

Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins

Publisher's summary

Torn between her ancestral home and her heart, Belinda Beverley must make a difficult choice.

As one of the two remaining unmarried Beverley sisters, Belinda considers herself the last hope for Mannerling, the beloved estate gambled away by their father. Each of her four elder sisters had hoped – even schemed - to marry one of Mannerling's successive owners. But all had chosen truelove over their ancestral home. Practical and duty-bound, Belinda would woo and wed Lord St. Clair, current holder of the estate. True, he is a silly fop, hardly what she desires in a husband, but she vows to make the man love her – even at the expense of her own happiness. Dashing Lord Gyre, however, can hardly ignore the ridiculous drama; Belinda is far too good for that dandy St. Clair. His lordship therefore decides it is his duty to win the lovely Belinda's heart.

©1997 M. C. Beaton (P)2014 AudioGO

Fun story despite an awful narrator.

I've listened to the entire series with the same narrator and have enjoyed them in spite of that.

Although the each book follows virtually the same outline - daughter wants ancestral home back, decides to marry unsuitable man while a perfectly good man was nearby. The excellent Miss Trumbull has by now grown tired of trying to get some sense into the next girl in line, and rightfully so. She decides to let Belinda make her own way and that goes about as well as you'd expect.

There's the usual villain who increasingly gets more malicious as time goes by. The only difference, character-wise, is that there's not a villainess teaming up with the bad guy. That was a nice change. Having one woman turn on another was getting a bit old.

The narrator of this series however, is horrible. If the stories weren't so gripping, and short, I don't think that I could have hung in with them because they are so poorly read. The mispronunciations, awkward pauses, long silences in the middle of random paragraphs, I sometimes thought that the book hadn't downloaded properly.

I won't buy anything read by this narrator again although I don't think that the poor quality is entirely to blame. It's obvious that there were any directors or editors on her work. Some of the mistakes were just silly and a good editor would have caught that. The narrator has a pleasant voice for the most part although you can always tell who the bad guy is going to be by how she makes their voice sound. The sentences are read unevenly with the inflection often being emphasized in the wrong place. That one is on the director. Maybe the narrator is better now but I doubt I'll take another chance to find out. Five books were enough of a sample to make an accurate decision.

In spite of that, I'm looking forward to listening to the final book in the series. Especially since it seems as if we finally get a look into the mysterious Miss Trumbull's real life. She really IS the star of the series, after all. :D