Reality in Check (A South Downs Romance #2) by Emily Banting, narrated by Angela Dawe

An art teacher and an artist in her own right, Arte Tremaine comes back to England, after years in Italy, to take over the hotel she and her sister inherited from their beloved grandmother. The place is in worse condition than Arte expected but that’s not the biggest surprise. When a TV crew shows up, she finds out her grandmother requested help from Hotel SOS and its bitchy host, Charlotte Beaufort, whose family is a huge name in the business.

Arte is passionate and brave, but she’s also borderline rude at times. I get that her bluntness with Charlotte comes from a place of love and belief that she’s not who the world sees, which is probably why she manages to slip under the hard surface. It feels different from Charlotte’s mother’s barbs, that’s for sure, but it made me feel for Charlotte anyway. Yet at the same time, meeting Arte was the motivation Charlotte needed to question her life. I enjoyed that part, the woman who’s always done what was expected of her finding the strength to start doing things differently one day. I also liked that the most vulnerable one wasn’t the obvious one.

I didn’t entirely buy the chemistry between the MCs, but I didn’t mind that too much. I’m okay with instalust and instalove and while I’d rather feel it, I can make myself believe the characters if they tell me it’s there.

I know Angela Dawe is a favourite with many sapphic audiobook listeners and I loved her narration of Broken Beyond Repair, but here, I wasn’t convinced by her voice for Charlotte, which sounded much older than her fifty-one years. And I loved Arte’s voice until I reread my notes and realised she was supposed to be thirty-eight and, again, the voice sounded younger than that. I had the same issue with Breaking Character, so I guess Dawe—like Banting—is hit or miss for me. That said, I liked everything else about her narration. She’s objectively very good, with a wide range of voices for secondary characters.

Broken Beyond Repair was one of my favourite audiobooks of 2023 and I was really looking forward to the next book in Emily Banting’s South Downs series. I wish I could say I loved it just as much. I enjoyed it overall, but I didn’t love it.

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