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The Boudreaux Family #4

Audible audiobook, KU e-book

Author: Kristen Proby

Narrators: Rachel Fulginiti and Sebastian York

Charly Boudreaux is not happy that her sister shipped her off to Nowhere, Montana for some seminar. The seminar is supposed to empower women, help them with developing self-esteem, navigating dating, and building career skills – everything that Charly has already achieved in her life. But she decides to go and check if this is good enough so that she can encourage her sister to attend it. 

Simon Danbury is the handsome, witty, wealthy and famous motivational speaker. The charming Brit seems to have the answers to all women’s problems, but his personal life is one giant mess. He finds Charly completely besotting and for the first time his “no mixing business with pleasure” rule is out the window…

I really liked Simon and Charly’s story on the whole, but there are a few things that gave me pause:

• a man empowering women. C’mon, we  don’t need a man to “mansplain” things to us anymore, do we?
• the theme of the seminar and Simon hitting on Charly anyway. That didn’t sit well with me. He could have waited after it was over at least. 
• We still see glamorization of Charly’s plantation house and its slave quarters. It made uncomfortable when it was mentioned. 

Their romance is off the charts, but these things bothered me a little. 

Narration: I’m excusing the narrators here because this is clearly a miscasting situation and it caused the first DNF of my life (I switched to eyeball reading). Simon is British and nowhere is there even a whiff of a British accent and it’s mentioned a lot that his accent is to swoon over as part of the plot. It threw me off so much I had to stop listening.

Possible triggers: mentions of an abusive and manipulative ex.