I like Jo Beverley’s Medieval stories and this is a unique story of a fractured marriage and a difficult situation of rebuilding a relationship. There is also a secondary couple of a would-be nun and a seductive knight who end up deeply in love – their more straightforward relationship brings relief from the tension in the primary couple dancing on the knife’s edge.
The narrator could handle some of the aspects, mainly the protagonist couple’s conflicts and emotions, but in other ways, she was a great disappointment.
First of all, she chose a very strange pronunciation for the hero’s name (Galeran) – she kept omitting the ‘l’ in the middle. Then, she could not keep a consistent voice pitch for the characters, especially the males. It even happened sometimes during the same dialog that something said by the male character sounded as high-pitched as the female character he was talking with, so I lost track of who was supposed to say what. Then, sometimes the characters spoke with a cartoonishly exaggerated voice totally inappropriate to anything but comedy, which this Medieval romance is not. A Medieval king pronouncing judgment can’t say “so be it” in a chirping governess voice! The knights had no weight and force to them at all. There is a long, crucial scene where the king sits in judgment of several of the characters, where the villains’ plot is revealed and they are served justice. This scene is completely ruined by the cartoonish, unreal way the characters speak and by the narrator occasionally using a soft feminine voice timbre when knights and king should be displayed by the voice.
The secondary hero, the Norman-French character Raoul has a really silly-sounding supposed French accent, and while his dialogue is supposed to be very sensual, there is nothing attractive in the way he speaks. Also, the narrator seems to be chuckling over the sensuality and physical attraction experienced by the characters,
I wish this was narrated by Susan Duerden who read the other recently published Jo Beverley titles. Or a male narrator even. Although I love Jo Beverley’s Medieval stories, I can’t really look forward to them if they are read by this narrator.