It’s Throwback Thursday! We are reviving some of our favorite reviews from over the years. This review was posted 9 years ago, on April 8, 2014, and created some lively discussions about narration/narrators. Enjoy this blast from the past!

Narrated by Kate Russell

I read Motorcycle Man last year. It’s the book that sent me down the Kristen Ashley rabbit hole and I emerged about a week later. I’ve heard it referred to (and have used the term myself) as the “gateway drug” to the crack that is Kristen Ashley.

Tack is without doubt my favourite of the Ashley heroes of the books I’ve read so far. While the story is told (mostly) from Tyra’s first person POV, for me, the character who stands out, head and shoulders above the rest, is Tack.

Tyra Masters is just about to start a new job as the office manager at Ride, the custom car shop owned by the Chaos Motorcycle Club. Kane “Tack” Allen is the President of Chaos. The night before she starts work, she attends a Chaos event and hooks up with Tack. When he kicks her out of his bed later that night and asks her to leave her number in case he wants some more one day, she is devastated. But she needs the job and she’s determined that her new boss, the jerk, will not push her out. So she turns up at work the next day and that’s when things start to get really interesting.

Life in the MC world is not like the life we know – but by taking the job at Ride, Tyra’s firmly in Tack’s world now and she has to learn his rules and how to navigate. He has a hell-on-wheels ex-wife who’s causing trouble and then there is the whole thing with the Russian mob. Some of it is over the top ridiculous but I love it.

I love the story and I love Tyra and I love Tack. Tyra pushes back – she doesn’t just roll over and let Tack push her around. While the MC world is very misogynistic, Tyra manages to leverage herself into a position of respect and Tack does make accommodations for her. For some readers/listeners it’s not enough and Tack is just an alpha-hole. While I don’t think I could cope very long in Tack’s world in real life, in fiction, it suited me just fine.

Which made it all the more disappointing when I heard the voice Ms. Russell used for Tack in this audiobook. Tack’s voice is described as a deep gravelly growl. Ms. Russell did not use (and I suspect, she does not have) a deep gravelly growl. Tack was not the Tack I was hoping for. Motorcycle Man would have been just the perfect book for the “Karen Marie Moning treatment”. In the later books of the Fever series, Natalie Ross read the narrative and the female dialogue and Phil Gigante read the male dialogue and it worked like a charm. I’m not sure exactly who would be my “Dream Man” (har har) in the role of Tack in audio format but it would definitely be a male with a really deep growly voice.

That said, with one (fairly significant caveat which I will go into later), Ms. Russell did deliver on characterisation. Although Tack’s voice didn’t sound right, his attitude did. Her performance of Tyra (with the exclusion of said caveat) was just wonderful. The other standout character was Elvira. She sounded exactly like I expected her to sound when I read the book.

Here’s my caveat. Kristen Ashley has a rather, er, unique style. Her sentence structure and dialogue can take some getting used to. In some ways, I think of it as another language. When I haven’t read an Ashley book for a little while, it takes me some time to settle into the rhythm and syntax of it. I don’t think Ms. Russell had a good handle on that syntax. Numerous times during the listen, she didn’t deliver the sentence or dialogue as it was meant to be delivered. For example, there’s a bit where Tyra thinks to herself “It was Tack, not a bad guy.” Out of context, that could have one of two meanings. Either it’s “It was Tack, who is an okay guy” or “It was Tack, not a villain out to hurt her.” In the audiobook, it was performed as the former when it should have been the latter. Later, when a character is in the ICU, what I heard was “I see you”, with the relevant slight pause between I and see/C so that it took me a second to realise that the sentence did actually make sense and someone is in the hospital.

Some of Ms. Russell’s performance was delivered differently from what I heard in my head when reading but this wasn’t always a problem. There were times when I thought – “oh, it could have sounded like that, that makes sense, yes, that could work”, even some occasions of “oh, that’s even better than I thought” but there were other times of “no, no, no”.

Possibly if one hasn’t read the print version prior to listening, they might enjoy the audiobook more. But I had very high expectations for Tack and I definitely wanted someone familiar with “Kristen Ashley-ese” to go over the performance before releasing it into the wild.

I found the narration difficult to grade because apart from those two things, it was excellent. But it’s also a bit like “well apart from that Mrs. Lincoln, did you enjoy the play?” Those things were so important (and the most important was Tack) that they had a significant impact for me.

Even so, Tack, being Tack, still made me laugh, as did Tyra and I did thoroughly enjoy it. And, now I want to read the book again. Because: Tack.