Score

Men of Hidden Creek

By: A. E. Wasp

Narrated by: Chris Chambers

Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins

Publisher's summary

Home is where you make it.

Beau Hopper is good at good-byes. A minor-league hockey player, he goes where the league tells him. Single and estranged from his family, Beau drifts without connections or commitments. He makes a living, not a life.

Former Marine Connor Casey's life revolves around his siblings. After Hurricane Harvey took their home and a car crash claimed their parents, Connor is determined to rebuild their house and their lives.

When Beau learns Connor might lose custody of his siblings if he can't finish the rebuild in time, he volunteers to help in exchange for a place to stay, and it isn't long before he finds himself in Connor's bed.

It takes more than passion and plywood to build a home, so when the league comes calling after Beau, Connor can't ask him to stay...but how can he ever let him go?

Contains mature themes.

©2018 A. E. Wasp (P)2018 Tantor

Loved it

Story= 5 stars. There is a real storyline here. Amazing chemistry between really well developed characters.
Narration= 5 stars. First time listening to Chris Chambers.. I am very impressed.
Overall = 5 stars. This story is heartwarming, I teared up a few times, it was laugh out loud funny, and there was some sizzling delicious hot and sexy times.


Charo

Solid story

New to me author. I liked it, mostly. Liked their brick wall method of dealing with frustration. There is not a substantial amount of hockey. (I was ok with the amount of hockey, but if hockey’s why you want to read it, scale back expectations of rink time.)

Steam: Med-low, mostly k i s s i n g (near a tree) but some M/M action does happen, happily.

Narration: It’s decent if you overlook the audible inhales throughout. The narrator, going the opposite way of the valley girl intonation arcs pretty much every sentence to end heavily with the exact same down tone. This doesn’t allow one to follow paragraphs as it sounds like each sentence stands alone. Toward the end, the phrasing lightens up some and sounds more fluid. It’s not that bad but it did make it harder for me to get into the story. He does appropriate accents when needed and accounts for things like characters yawning during a line.

So cute...

This is the cutest book I've had the pleasure of listening to in a while. The book was represented well by the narrator and the narrator gave a great performance that worked well with the book.

I will be revisiting this book again and again. Well worth the time.

love it

it's funny and sweet at the same time. I like how both men are macho. wow. love the kids.

Good story that falls into a couple traps

This was an excellent novel, and I very much enjoyed listening to it. It took me a little while to get used to the narrator, but he definitely grows on you, and his character voices are extremely good. The characters are likable and the romance is one that you root for.

Having kids in your story can be dangerous, because there's a tendency to make them just a little TOO precious. Mostly, this book manages to avoid this, giving each of Connor's siblings a distinct personality and I ended up liking all of them. There are a couple instances where they say things that I'm pretty sure kids wouldn't say--Connor's sister Fiona is the worst offender, with the youngest brother Benji close behind--but in general they're a lot better than most kids in novels.

More problematic is the pitfall that m/m novels fall into time and time again, and it seems an odd criticism coming from a gay man: there are too many gay characters in this novel. Seriously, the author goes out of her way to mention several times how small the town is, and how few and far between gay characters are there, but then every other adult character ends up being gay or lesbian. Connor's boss, a random coach, half the hockey players on Beau's team, random fans in the stands, and so on and so on. It gets so that whenever there's a homophobic character, you expect them to be overrun by the 75% of the town that calls themselves gay.

I don't want to get hung up on criticism because it really was an excellent book, and overall I really enjoyed it. It's VERY long, but I can definitely see myself listening to it again.

A warning about the narration/sound

I'll start off with a review of the book, since I wouldn't have normally written a review for it I don't feel I have a very helpful opinion about the story. It was a pretty alright book, I always rate based on my judgment of a book alongside peers of the same genre(s)/themes/subjects, so out of what I'd expect after reading the summary, it was a generous 4/5. Worth the time spent listening to it, it kept my interest enough that I found myself willing to work longer just so I had an excuse to keep listening.

I hesitated when reading the description due half the main pair being a hockey player, but gave it a shot because a review mentioned it wasn't very hockey-filled. I like a sports romance as much as the next person, but why are so many of them about hockey? It's been done very well enough times that I have good examples to judge every subpar book against, and I don't understand why it seems they're leading themselves to comparisons that cannot be flattering, is this a weird correlation where some hockey romances did well (because they were good) so now everyone who wants to write a sports romance writes one with hockey? Anyway, the other reviewer didn't lead me astray, I think there may have been more story time dedicated to talking about Beau's van than hockey, so it didn't feel like a sports romance much at all.

It was very much focused on characters over plot, as I'd expect given the summary. I didn't feel characters were too flat, even with how many there were. I will agree with the reviewer who mentioned it strained the suspension of disbelief that almost every character in the book is gay, especially given the small southern town they live in, but I've read books that are worse about this.

It had some nice elements of adjusting perspective to change the narratives we have in our heads about people who love us, how we grow up, what we deserve. I wanted to read this as I was craving a family-focused story, and it was, but not quite as much in the way of parenting-and-absorbing-scraps-of-domesticity sort of thing as sort of like it was, Connor is the oldest kid, he's very much their big brother rather than their parent, in my opinion as the eldest kid.

I believe the main pair were both meant to be around thirty (I know Beau was), but they felt younger to me, more in the new-adult stage of life than I would expect people who haven't lived with their parents in more than a decade to be. I'm in my mid-twenties and found it a big odd how their strained/distant relationships with their parents (or in Connor's case, what that relationship had been) and forging an identity were such huge factor in their lives given what was going on.

By which I only mean I think the ages were written to let hockey and the military have been a thing for them rather than for the age they seemed to be, but it wasn't bad. I felt for Connor, as I have some similar feelings about my dad, who I lost suddenly when I was 19. Minor spoilers, when the parent at the softball game was talking about Connor's stepdad and how he'd have been proud of him, how he'd never talked about Connor like he was a mess, was heartbreaking. And Beau and his dad made me tear up a little.

Anyway, it was worthwhile, not in my top domesticity or sports or really any category by any stretch but I'd read more by this author.

Now, the sound, the part I felt I needed to review.

I've listened to over 300 audiobooks and I've listened to enough hours of podcasts to add up yo months, I tend to be fairly well inured to bad sound editing, equipment, or narration style. I don't think I've listened to anything narrated by Chris Chambers previously, and I don't yet know if it was even his doing that the sound experience was not all-together pleasant. I like his voice itself, his southern accent was nice, he has a pretty good range of different character voices, and his narration style wasn't bad at all.

But I nearly stopped listening to this book within the first five minutes because of the loud inhales between every sentence, it was jarring and incredibly distracting. I've never had this problem while listening to a book before, I'm leaning toward blaming either the equipment or editing because I can't imagine he's actually breathing that much louder than any other narrator, right?

Poor audio quality is usually easier to ignore at higher listening speed, and I often don't even notice issues in cases where a healthy third of reviews complain about the sound/narrator, so I was surprised to see no reviews mentioning this when I started it off at 2.35x speed. After feeling like I wasn't able to parse meaning from the English language anymore between each loud breath, I tried reducing it in increments until I was all the way down to 1x speed, and it was still noisy. I tried turning the volume down, it didn't help. Tried using crappy headphones, but the gasp between sentences. Was. Still. There.

To give it the benefit of the doubt, maybe if you enoy listening at normal speed usually, and hadn't first heard the grating cadence of brief soothing speech interrupted by a loud, quick sip of air again and again, it might not be annoying. I borrowed this book for "free" (Audible Escape), so I'm not upset about it, but I would have returned it if I'd paid money. Still listened to the whole thing, still going to give the narrator another try, still felt I should say something about it.

Great Characters

I liked this book from the beginning. Con's struggles and learning how to accept love and help were very real and presented with compassion. Beau was a rich boy who grew up into his understanding of himself and relationships. loved the portrayal of all the children. Very real. All around fine book. I also really like the performer and his various voice changes.

Amazing Story and Narration.

This is the first audio book I have ever listened to, because I just don’t have the tile to read anymore with work and school. I loved the steamy romance and I was constantly driven to an audible “awwwwe” while listening. Not to mention the several times I laughed and earned myself some strange looks from bystanders. It was absolutely a fantastic story.

Smouldering romance with lively family in tow

Very good narrator does well with multiple voices in this one; younger hockey player on way out falls for ex marine out in the styx with 4 children, who, unusually, are not annoying but developed characters in their own right. The story proceeds through a series of mini crises but ends on an upbeat note as unity is ultimately established.

Loved It

Score isn't the same hockey player/casual hook up story. this story has depth, struggle, family values and real feelings. The relationship between Beau and Con is important, but it's the relationship between the two men and the kids that is seemingly more important! Great job Chris!