Hold on My Heart

De: Tracy Brogan

Narrado por: Angela Dawe

To build a future, sometimes you have to tear down the past... Chicago event planner Libby Hamilton can turn any bland setting into a dramatic venue - but when she abruptly loses her job, and her fair-weather boyfriend moves to another state, Libby suddenly finds herself back in the tiny town she grew up in. Worse than that, her father wants help transforming an old schoolhouse into a vintage ice cream parlor and Libby must trade in her power suits for power tools.

Widowed restoration specialist Tom Murphy can rebuild just about anything - except the shattered relationship he shares with his teenaged daughter. Hired by Libby’s father, Tom isn’t interested in sharing the details of his personal life with the beautiful, spunky Libby. He just wants to get the job done. But she is tenacious - and sexy - and it doesn’t take long before she breaks down his walls, builds up his hope, and gets a hold on his heart that won’t let go.

©2013 Tracy Brogan (P)2013 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.

Average

Setting: Small town America, contemporary
Genre: Romance
Just when this book was getting good, it was over. Libby is a humiliatingly unemployed event planner newly returned from Chicago to her small town and back in with the parents. Tom is a widowed contractor with a surly teenager. The two meet when Libby's retired father decides to renovate an old building.This book was slow and felt incomplete, as though the author had the bare bones of the premise and was working on filling it in when she hit deadline. Seriously. This could so much have benefitted from a little more to the plot and characters. Where were this woman's beta readers?
Okay, so the premise is a woman moves back home and meets a man who needs to, emotionally, move on. While not terribly original, it has potential. The characters were pretty much one-dimensional, and the story sort of went in fits and starts, going in interesting directions, then petering out. I was left with so many what-ifs, I have decided that I just need a whole 'nother book altogether.
So, what did we get? To me, it felt like an outline that needed to be fleshed out and edited. There were so many ways this book could have gone to take it above more than an average read. But hey, the grammar and spelling were great!
I generally like Angela Dawe as a narrator, but not so much with this performance. It just comes off as amateurish, without much differentiation between characters. I thought maybe this was an early performance, but that isn't the case. Well, I guess everyone's entitled to an off day every once in a while.

loved it

great story of finding yourself after a loss and for never giving up..no matter how corky or broken families can be

Good Story - Slow during the first half!

This was a slow read for me and it was hard to connect to the characters during the first half of the story. The ending picked up and the supporting characters helped give the story depth.

Descriptive Sex - last 1/3 of the book.

Nagging, Overdramatic voice ruins the story

Would you consider the audio edition of Hold on My Heart to be better than the print version?

absolutely not!! I could barely handle listening to it. I started the book through the audio version and thought I hated the book, but then I read some and it was much better. I only listed to it for parts when I couldn't read and I really wanted to find out what happened next.

What other book might you compare Hold on My Heart to and why?

I have read and listened to all of Tracy Brogan's books and they are all great on paper. I have hear this voice in one other book (not Tracy Brogan's) and I hated it there too.

Would you be willing to try another one of Angela Dawe’s performances?

No!! I will look for her name and try to avoid the audio version of those books as much as possible!

Surprised at how good book is

I really enjoyed Ms Brogan’s writing. Very down to earth & funny! I laughed out loud several times. Quite witty! I will read more of her books!

Horrible narrator

I liked the story, but audible should be more critical of the narrators, this one was one of the worst!

Hold on

It was a slow start but i love a great love story. A lot of ups and downs..,glad i kept reading.

Okay story, but narration was stiff.

The dialogue was performed well enough, but I found the narration unnatural, stilted and awkward.

Narrator voice too irritating

Loved the story but the narrator's intonation was nasal and she drug out the end ing of every sentence. almost couldn't finish the book.

Just ok..

Any additional comments?

One reviewer said she could have done without so much sex. Really? At 35% the was no sex, no desire, no lust, no wanting, no nothing. So, I assumed there was going to be sex later on. Gratuitous sex. The kind of sex the publishers want. Geez, I just hate that. Either have sexual tension/sex in the whole book or don’t have it at all. It’s stupid to have page after page of no thoughts about it then BAM there’s the sex. So, at 62-ish% they had sex and not one thing led up to it. It makes for poor reading when there’s no desire of any kind then they’re screwing like rabbits. It went from nothing to at least 3 sex scenes. That’s just stupid, IMO.

I did like all the players: Tom, Libby, Ginny, Ben, Marti, Dante, Peter, Beverly and bitchy old Nana but I can’t see myself reading this author again. I just hate the first half the book being nothing and then the second half filled with desire and sex.

***I would give this author 5 stars for the fact that she DID NOT have Libby SCREAM out Tom's name when she had an orgasm. Having a heroine do that is just stupid, stupid, stupid.***

As to the narration: Ms. Dawe has her hits and misses and this was just an ok narration. Most of the time she sounded just like a robot; no whispering, no laughing no nothing. She just kinda' read the book. Her voices were fine but you need to do more than just do voices.