She handled this task extremely well, telling us in the narration that Eveline has trouble knowing if she is speaking too loud or not loud enough, but not actually subjecting us to these volume variations. She had the added complication of speaking for Eveline, a character who is deaf and has not spoken in 3 years. It didn’t take me too long to get over it, though – I should have remembered this from her narration of Joanna Bourne’s The Spymaster’s Lady. At first I had trouble with this, partly because Banks’ prose seemed to call for an accent. I wasn’t expecting her to read the narrative in her native American accent, while reading the dialogue in a Scots brogue. Narrator Kirsten Potter was a wonderful surprise. The suspense part is mostly at the end, but it reads just like contemporary suspense, with the added creepiness of a medieval setting complete with dungeons and revenge by broadsword. The theme of dealing with deafness – she has taught herself to read lips, and eventually starts to talk again – is a major part of the story, as is the acceptance of differences. But even though the laird accepts his fate, his clan does not, and many of them shun Eveline. When King Alexander II decrees that she must marry the Montgomery clan laird to end decades of clan rivalries, she has a chance at a new beginning.
She’s so relieved he is gone, that she encourages everyone to continue to think she is “touched” rather than face the possibility that he will change his mind. It also made her fiancé cry off, thinking she has suffered loss of her mental faculties. Heroine Eveline Armstrong suffered a fall that brought about hearing loss three years earlier. Who knew? An author who writes in several different genres! What I learned is that it is a medieval romantic suspense (really, it read just like a romantic suspense but was set in 1215), not erotic romance, and in spite of the title, tackles a serious subject and handles it with emotion and sensitivity. I was surprised to learn that a book by Maya Banks, an author known to me for erotic romance, was nominated for an Audie.
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