Grau

Wow, this has to be the dumbest book I have listened to so far. I will listen to just about anything that is light and fun, fact or fiction, vampires or not. This means that my tolerance is fairly high for predictability, immature heroines, weak plots, etc. AS LONG as there is either well-written humor or a good story in there somewhere, chances are I'll enjoy it. This book, however, is intolerable. No actual humor, no characters to care about, no believable (or at least creative) plot, the whiniest protagonist ever and irritating overuse of the term "God's blood". How did this book get so many stars?!

I love all the books so far, for all the good reasons other people have mentioned in their reviews. The only thing missing is Roy Dotrice's amazing performance, which put the previous books in the series over the top. This narrator is good, too, but Roy is the king of narration and that is hard to compete with.

This could have been a lot better if it hadn't been so smutty - I read MMIYC and Natural Born Charmer and some other SEP books, which I remember liking - I then bought Fancy Pants and It Had To Be You, and was sorely disappointed. To read these seemed to me a definite and unexpected step into bodice ripper territory.

I was equally disappointed by the lack of wit I remember from other books by SEP. The story also seemed to be brewed on largely the same ingredients as at least two of her other books.

The narrator does a good job, as in the other books, but she will forever sound like someone a bit older than the main characters. I am not put off by it though.

I am a very uncritical consumer of beach read-type audiobooks, and am thus used to a fair amount of over the top scenarios and ditto reactions. While this book is well written and the audio version well read, too, the story is just too unrealistic to truly matter to me. The end is satisfying though, and, given the unrealistic premise, it makes sense. Still, I didn't really enjoy it for great parts of the plot.