Audiobook, KOBO
Blue Cedar Falls #1
Author: Jeannie Chin
Narrators: Zachary Webber and Katy Tang
June Wu helps run her family’s inn in Blue Cedar Falls. When the new highway basically cuts the small town of the tourist routes, business is hard for everyone on Main Street. It’s even harder for the inn, because a few months ago, June’s mom suffered a stroke and the hospital bills are piling up and June wants to fix it all before stressing her family out about it.
Enter Clay Hawthorne, army veteran who comes to town to fulfill the dream of his fallen best friend to open a bar on Main Street that will welcome everyone.
The renovations and the noise that comes with construction are driving June nuts and driving her customers away. She can’t afford that and she decides to confront Clay. The man is a human version of Grumpy Cat and they start on the wrong foot, but June needs all the help she can get to make the Pumpkin festival a success and bring tourist to the little town and to save the inn and she is willing to try to get along with the man and save the town.
I am conflicted about this book. I loved everything in it: the characters, the diversity (June is Asian-American, her best friend is gay), it’s a cute small town, we have a grumpy hero, it’s well-written… but there is something about the pace of this story. No, it’s not a slow burn – the enemies turn into lovers pretty soon and the P goes in the V very soon too… but everything seemed to take forever to happen in the book and chronologically it’s not even a long time. The whole thing is about this Pumpkin Festival that seems to never come. Again, it’s very well written, but I wanted to scream at some points: Get on with it already!!!!!
If you like a slow paced story, you will definitely like this one.
And here’s what good narration can do to a book: I was so frustrated sometimes that I wanted to DNF it, but Zachary Webber is PHENOMENAL in this one. If you like him doing different voices you are in for a treat! And the emotion! OMG! Really, it’s superb! Katy Tang is a new narrator for me and I really enjoyed her work on this one. I am not sure I liked the way she made June’s mom sound, but I am not familiar with the accents and I really can’t judge. Great work from these two!
Possible triggers: feelings of abandonment, financial stress, anxiety, loss of a best friend, parent’s illness and recovery, fear of homophobia
