Lean on Me

De: HelenKay Dimon

Narrado por: Gwen Hughes

Cassidy Clarke once climbed the world's highest mountains, but after an unexpected illness ends her career she's back in her hometown, broke and hoping for a little luck. But the townsfolk aren't exactly putting out a welcome mat for the woman who once snubbed them in the media, despite her apologies now.

Mitch Anders knows someone has set up camp on the grounds of his plant nursery, and he's surprised to find his sexy high school crush ducking questions about where she's staying. Though he's sworn to stop cleaning up other people's messes, Mitch offers Cassidy a job and a place to stay - his place. Bed-sharing optional, but definitely welcome.

Out of options and too attracted to Mitch to keep things platonic, Cassidy says yes to his offer. She wants to get back on her feet financially and start a new career. She never expects to suffer a different kind of fall, one that has her believing Mitch just might bring her something bigger and better than luck.

©2012 HelenKay Dimon (P)2012 Audible, Inc.

Already heard the book after this one.

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

Didn't get too far into it. I had already heard the book after this one.

What didn’t you like about Gwen Hughes’s performance?

Couldn't get engaged in her voice or tone.

I just did not enjoy this

First let me say this was my first book by Ms. Dimon and the first I have heard narrated by Ms. Hughes. The narration by Ms. Hughes was such that I couldn't tell if my problems with the story were the actual story or the tone of the narration.

The narration sounded whiny, even when there would be no reason for whiny. The narration seemed to try to create angst where there should be no angst. Scenes that I think were put in for comedy relief, well, they just seemed painful.

This is a very short category book, and I think that may be part of my problem with the book. There are a lot of important issues in this book, homelessness, health care costs, foreclosures, small town pettiness, trust in relationships; but the length of the book necessitated these to be dealt with in a surface way, resulting in lots of holes in the narrative. So the heroine has been living in the wild for quite sometime (as implied by her saying she hasn't slept on a mattress in a very long time), yet there appears to be no physical sign of this. She seems well kempt, or at least nobody comments that she looks dissheveled. Nobody mentions body odor even after she gets up close and personal with the hero.


Honestly, if I were reading the book myself, putting my own "tone" on it, I might not have noticed. But I was irritated by the narration and when I get irrated by a book, whether I am reading or listening, I get nitpicky and petty. And as a further example of that, the cover of this book makes me a little cranky, too. Normally the covers matter not at all to me. But we have a book, a story about two people firmly in adulthood who work outside. What we have on the cover are two very pale people who look to be late teens, very early 20s at the most. Yeah, petty, I know. But it seems indicative of many problems. with the book.

While I will give Ms. Dimon another chance by reading another of her books, it will take lots of research and sampling before I give Ms. Hughes another chance.

(I needed a short listen that I wouldn't get sucked into for hours -- my discipline is sorely lacking -- and I read good reviews of this book on other sites so I chose this one without my normal research process. At $3.95, it wasn't too expensive of a lesson to learn.)