A very enjoyable audiobook for an entertaining story
Every time that the subject of multiple narrators for a single book comes up among audiobook fans, there seems to be an agreement that instead of reading alternate chapters, we wish they would read the entire book together, each narrator performing the same character throughout. Normally we lament that it would be a logistics nightmare as the narrators would need to be recording in the same booth together, making that very hard to achieve. But… what if one of the most celebrated Sapphic audiobooks narrators would actually share a booth with her fiancee who is also a narrator? For all of us Sapphic audiobooks fans, our dreams just came true!
A London Love Story was born as a Kindle Vella series, an Amazon product in which US-based authors publish serialized stories, one short episode at a time. After a while, authors are allowed to publish the episodes as a whole book and audiobook. Season 1 was originally published as episodes 1 to 80 and the authors promote it as The L Word meets Sex and The City.
The series follows the lives of four American women living in London in search of love. Taylor Elliot is an aspiring writer who ends up working in her dad’s pub, Emma Garfield is a talented chef with a hot temper that always gets her in trouble, Jasmine Singh is a perpetual graduate student who is about to marry her boyfriend, and Lexi Channing is a biracial adopted daughter of a wealthy NY family who is secretly in love with her straight best friend.
I have to warn readers that this series ends up with a massive cliffhanger for all four main characters. The authors make this clear in the blurb but Miranda MacLeod promised in a recent newsletter post that they are planning on writing Season 2 soon which will be the final season and guarantees that all ladies will have a happily ever after. According to the author, Season 2 will be available in Kindle Vella first and as an ebook and audiobook by the end of the year. So if you don’t like cliffhangers, there’s the option to wait until then.
There was a bit of a talk on social media before the audiobook was out which included the release of a couple of funny audio excerpts (check them here). Marisa Calin, Lori Prince’s fiancee, has a great British accent and as this story has both American and British characters, they were both a perfect match to narrate this book.
The majority of the characters are American so most of the book is narrated by Lori Prince but Ms. Calin performs the British characters and the moments when they are together are the best of the audiobook. Lori Prince’s talent is well known to all Sapphic audiobooks fans but I was pleasantly surprised by both Ms. Calin’s range of voices and her performance skills. I sincerely hope that they do more books together because their real-life chemistry is reflected in fiction too. Overall, a very enjoyable audiobook for an entertaining story. 5 stars.
Length: 10 hours, 1 minute
