I didn’t plan to go on a time-travel-novel bender, but recently I seem to have consecutively chosen several such novels from my various libraries without meaning to. Maybe This Time compares well. It’s a high-quality and entertaining time-travel story performed through Audible by talented actors Zoe Chao and Noah Reid, both of whose voices grew on me very quickly. The fine production value includes the convincing work done by secondary-character narrators and skillful Foley artists.
Listeners will witness the blossoming friendship and eventual love (not really a spoiler—this is, after all, a romance novel) between English teacher June Flint and coach Mikey Shannon, former childhood friends who are now thrown together by odd circumstances. I have to admit I pictured Chao and Reid as June and Mikey throughout the story. That was fine by me. With a performance like this, there’s no narrator, so the listener is given much leeway in imagining the characters based on their voices alone. I don’t know if Noah Reid has Mikey’s muscles, but he did while Cara Bastone’s book streamed through my AirPods.
I always prefer an actual book, with narrative, asides, and clever dialogue tags. But this Audible Original provides close to six hours of entertainment I fully welcomed and can easily recommend.