Narrated by Erik
Bloomquist & Madeleine Dauer

I bought the ebook of Anton based solely on the gorgeous cover – yes, I’m that shallow. In my defence, it was the best cover I’ve seen for ages. (Sadly, the current cover is a cut down version so my recommendation is to check out the original on Goodreads. Seriously, do it. I’ll wait. Also, the audiobook cover is different again and not a patch on the original ebook cover. It’s okay. I have a good memory.) Anyway, as it so often the case with books I buy, I haven’t had time to read it yet so I was pretty happy to sign up to review the audiobook.

Anton Petrov is
the captain of the Chicago Blaze hockey team. He’s had it bad for the wife of a
teammate for nearly three years. He’s never acted on it because she is married
but it has led to him being celibate for a long time and not even attempting to
date anyone else.

Mia Brown is
married to Adam Marceau but has been separated from him for about eight months.
Adam is a serial cheater and abusive to Mia. Listeners, please note there is
some sexual coercion, emotional abuse and physical violence towards Mia from
Adam during the course of the book. Adam is a very bad guy. While I’m
here, I’ll also say Mia is infertile and this is something which is a conflict,
at least for Mia, throughout the book.

When Anton
realises that Mia is separated from Adam, he steps up to become Mia’s friend.
She has virtually no-one and Adam has frozen her out of the joint bank accounts
and refuses to give her a divorce unless she agrees to leave the marriage with
nothing. Mia would do this but she is paying a crapton of money every month for
nursing home care for her beloved grandfather (she was raised by her
grandparents) who has Alzheimer’s Disease. Mia can’t afford a lawyer however so
she lives in a kind of limbo, coerced to perform sex acts for Adam to get the
money to pay for the nursing care her grandfather needs. In the meantime, she
works at a bar and is studying to finish college. She had dropped out when she
met and married Adam and is picking her life up again.

Anton and his
fraternal twin brother Alexei were sent to the USA from Russia when they were
only five years old (FIVE. My heart!) and have been living in America ever
since, fostered by a hockey coach (and his wife) who trained them both from an
early age. Anton considers the coach to be family too and has been looking
after “Uncle Dix” for some months because reasons. Uncle Dix is a cantankerous
old man who needs care but resents it. He is also rude, obnoxious and mean and
he keeps chasing off the nursing help that Anton hires to be with him when Anton
is away playing or training.

Mia has
experience with eldercare and eventually, Anton hires her to “eldersit” with
Uncle Dix. This provides care for Dix and Mia with money (Anton pays her very
well) and they get to spend some time together so Yahtzee!

Mia is a bit shy
of relationships after the disaster that has been her marriage and, in any
event, even though Adam never respected their marriage vows, she does. And
Anton is not a cheater either. So they agree from the start that whatever their
feelings might be they will not act on them until Mia gets a divorce and
Mia is ready. Anton makes it clear he is willing to wait as long as it takes.

Technically I
guess they have an emotional affair but it never bothered me because Mia and
Adam’s marriage was long over before anything remotely romantic happened
between her and Anton. They don’t so much as kiss until the divorce is final
however. I guess that serves to ramp up the sexual tension but it also means
that they get to know one another well before anything happens.

Anton is a
paragon of men – he has a reputation as eating cleanly, not drinking alcohol
and being celibate – the first two are because he wants to keep playing hockey
as long as he can and the second is because he’s got it bad for Mia. But he is
also a really good guy. He’s respectful, generous, kind, loving and sweet –
basically, everything Adam is not.

In some ways the
story falls in to the id reading (listening) category, with fairly broad
characterisations and stark differences between the good guy and the bad guy
but I’m not complaining. I’d have liked a bit more detail about some things and
I thought some of Mia’s actions late in the book didn’t quite make sense, but
I’m not going to complain about Anton being practically perfect.

I listened to
this book in less than 24 hours so it clearly worked well enough to hold my
attention. I am a sucker for a rescue and Anton was very much the knight in
shining armour. Mia was a damsel in distress in some ways but she wasn’t
helpless and she did more than her fair share to help Anton too – she totally
saved his bacon with Uncle Dix for example.

The narration
was a bit of a mixed bag for me. Madeleine Dauer narrates the sections from
Mia’s perspective and Erik Bloomquist narrates those portions from Anton’s.
Both of the performers had pluses and minuses.

Ms. Dauer did
well when she was voicing Mia but I didn’t care for her depiction of Anton all
that much and there were times when she sounded kind robot-like, particularly
when she was outside of Mia’s thoughts or words.

Mr. Bloomquist
had good expression in his voice when he was voicing Anton and I liked his
female character voices, but he lost a lot of expression when he was delivering
Mia’s lines.

That said, the
narration did grow on me over the course of the book. Frankly I put that down
to that I liked the characters and the tropes were really working for me more
than anything else.

Technically I
noticed a few errors but nothing major. And, I did listen to the entire book in
about a day so the issues I had with the narration weren’t significant enough
for me to stop my iPod.

There is little
conflict between Anton and Mia – they clearly belong together but sometimes
that’s exactly the kind of story I want to listen to – for me, Anton was
the right audiobook at the right time.