Narrated by Charlotte Anne Dore

My Beautiful Enemy is a very different story for Sherry Thomas – as The Hidden Blade, which introduces us to Catherine Blade, the half-Chinese, half-British martial arts master heroine, and Leighton Atwood, while both in their youth.

Catherine, whose Chinese childhood nickname is Ying-ying, is the illegitimate daughter of a Chinese courtesan and an English adventurer whom she never met. She is trained in the highest forms of martial arts in order to protect herself. As the story opens, Catherine is on her way to England by steamer, in the company of 2 other English women, when they are attacked by an unseen and unknown assailant in a roiling storm at sea. We get our first taste of the adventure that is woven throughout the book as Catherine manages to hold off the villain and knock him overboard. This showcases the dichotomy of her character – she is both a proper English miss and a warrior woman. But she is not prepared for the shock of finding another enemy in England when she arrives – a man she thought she had killed 8 years prior, Captain Leighton Atwood, who is now betrothed to the daughter of one of her companions.

The story develops in flashbacks, something Thomas fans will recognize, in a way that reveals slowly the details of her relationship to Atwood. Eight years ago, he was an English spy, passing himself off as a Persian merchant in Chinese Turkestan; she was passing herself off as a Kazakh boy. He is easily as accomplished as she in languages and martial arts, and he sees right away that she is a young woman, not a boy. As they travel together, Atwood does not reveal his knowledge of her gender until after she is gravely wounded and he has to care for her. But theirs is still a very tenuous relationship, and neither is ready to trust their true identities with the other.

These sections are where the heart of the story develops and where the action is most Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon-esque – very exciting passages that require your utmost concentration as villains and heroes clash. The mysteries of their relationship in England 8 years later also add to the tension that kept me sitting at the edge of my seat for most of the book. It’s beautifully told and almost cinematic in the telling.

Charlotte Anne Dore is new to me as a narrator, although she has a couple of dozen audiobooks at Audible right now. Her reading is also a dichotomy of sorts – her narrative tone and her accents are good. She uses a sort of hoarse, lower pitch for male voices that distinguishes them well from the females, and she had a number of distinctive accents and acting tricks for all the characters. As I listened, it seemed that for about 85-90% of the book, her story-telling skills were fine, even if she did have a funny, affected way of pronouncing some words. It’s the 10-15% of the time where her pacing was unnatural that bothered me. I hear this in inexperienced narrators – they take breaths or pauses right smack dab in the middle of phrases or put the emphasis on the wrong syllable or word, upsetting the natural rhythm of speech. It’s very jarring and really pulls me out of the story. It stops the cadence, and it seems even more pronounced in a book with action scenes. Not being a narrator myself, I don’t know why this happens – do they not feel the rhythm of speech? Are they not measuring their breathing properly? I know sometimes singers and wind instrument players actually mark their music for accent/emphasis and breaths – perhaps this is something narrators do (or should do) as well? It doesn’t ruin the story completely, but it never rises to the A-level for me, and really detracted from the execution of the plot. Harrumph.

Melinda

Narration: C

Book Content: A

Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in

Violence: Escalated fighting

Genre: Historical Romance

Publisher: Tantor Audio

My Beautiful Enemy was provided to AudioGals by Tantor Audio for review.