Audiobook Review: Falling for the Bad Boy by Kennedy Fox (Bedtime Reads #1)
Note: This audiobook was provided by the authors via InkSlinger PR in exchange for an honest review.
Falling for the Bad Boy is my first listen from Kennedy Fox, the pseudonym used by the writing duo of Brooke Cumberland and Lyra Parish, and it's the first book in their Bedtime Reads series. For this series starter, we have romance novelist Vada Collins arriving in Charleston, South Carolina, having scheduled a week-long stay at a guesthouse she found online. Things get off on the wrong foot when she meets Ethan Rochester, owner of the main house and guesthouse. Assumptions are made and animosity brews between Ethan and Vada. However, there's a thin line between love and hate, and soon, the two engage in an affair, one with a definite deadline. In the span of a week, though, Vada finds herself developing feelings for bad boy Ethan, but she has to head back to Chicago sooner or later, and his past could have already doomed any sort of hope of a future.
I'm just going to put this out there: I didn't like Vada. She did grow on me much, much later on, but she was far from ever becoming a favorite female main character. Maybe it was because she rubbed me the wrong way from the moment she was introduced in the book. She was bitchy and jumped from one conclusion to another when it came to Ethan, even after they started sleeping together. Then there was how she decided to handle something she was told by someone she chose to believe over the guy she was intimate with. Go figure. On the other hand, Ethan was intriguing, especially when there were hints of a painful past, one that was quite heartrending when finally revealed in its entirety. To be honest, I felt that he deserved someone better than Vada, almost as if she wasn't worth all the effort that he put into her even after everything that had transpired.
Now, in terms of the narration, I was rather impressed with both C.J. Bloom and Joe Arden, both of whom were first-time narrators to me. As much as I wasn't a fan of Vada's, Bloom made her sound like the way I had imagined she would in my head. Arden did an exemplary job bringing life to Ethan, who I felt was a more complex and layered main character compared to Vada. They helped to make my listening experience a better one, with their narration rating four stars as far as I was concerned, which does help bring the overall rating up because the story was at three, and that was mostly because of Ethan's back story and his evolution from a man who was tormented by his past to one who had hope for a happier future. The last few chapters made this feel more like the romance I was hoping for, leading to Falling for the Bad Boy getting a final average of 3.5 stars. ♥
I'm just going to put this out there: I didn't like Vada. She did grow on me much, much later on, but she was far from ever becoming a favorite female main character. Maybe it was because she rubbed me the wrong way from the moment she was introduced in the book. She was bitchy and jumped from one conclusion to another when it came to Ethan, even after they started sleeping together. Then there was how she decided to handle something she was told by someone she chose to believe over the guy she was intimate with. Go figure. On the other hand, Ethan was intriguing, especially when there were hints of a painful past, one that was quite heartrending when finally revealed in its entirety. To be honest, I felt that he deserved someone better than Vada, almost as if she wasn't worth all the effort that he put into her even after everything that had transpired.
Now, in terms of the narration, I was rather impressed with both C.J. Bloom and Joe Arden, both of whom were first-time narrators to me. As much as I wasn't a fan of Vada's, Bloom made her sound like the way I had imagined she would in my head. Arden did an exemplary job bringing life to Ethan, who I felt was a more complex and layered main character compared to Vada. They helped to make my listening experience a better one, with their narration rating four stars as far as I was concerned, which does help bring the overall rating up because the story was at three, and that was mostly because of Ethan's back story and his evolution from a man who was tormented by his past to one who had hope for a happier future. The last few chapters made this feel more like the romance I was hoping for, leading to Falling for the Bad Boy getting a final average of 3.5 stars. ♥
Date Listened to: 13 March 2018
Learn more about Kennedy Fox.
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