Ticket To Paradise

This isn’t a book, it’s a cassette tape. With a total running time of about 90 minutes, it’s a perfect way to get your romance in during a walk, work-out, or lengthy commute. I listened to the tape during my 40 minute drive to work (and my 50 minute drive home), and it was an interesting experience. At $10.99, it’s a pricey little item, so, unless you plan on listening to the tape many times, I’m not sure it’s worth it.

The two stories featured on this tape were very mild romances read by (I am assuming) professional actors. All-in-all, this is a nifty idea, but I did have a couple of problems with the concept.

Reading a romance, and hearing a romance read to you, are two totally different experiences. Awkward for me, at first, not knowing how steamy these stories were going to get. Fortunately, things were kept to a minimum … I’m not sure I would have enjoyed “hearing” an explicit love scene read by a man on a tape in my car. It would have felt pornographic somehow, or simply silly.

Also, the actors provided vocal inflections and regional accents I found a little annoying, although both readers had very pleasant voices, especially the actress. When I read a story, I “hear” the characters’ voices in my head. The vocal intonations on the tape often were at odds with what I would have conjured up in my own head, so it was an adjustment for me.

It’s a little difficult rating these two stories, since they are so short (they could not have been more than 20 pages of printed text). I certainly can’t call them romance “novels” or even short stories, since they are much shorter than those you would find in a printed anthology. Perhaps romantic audio entertainment, since it’s a combined-media sort of thing.