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Jason Kellerman’s life revolves around his eight-year-old daughter. Teenage curiosity with his best friend led to Maggie’s birth, and her mother tragically died soon after. Only 25 and a single dad, Jason hasn’t had time to even think about romance. Disowned by his wealthy family, he’s scrimped and saved to bring Maggie west for a camping vacation. The last thing Jason expects is to question his sexuality after meeting a sexy, older park ranger.
Ben Hettler’s stuck. He loves working in the wild under Montana’s big sky, but at 41, his love life is non-existent, his ex-boyfriend just married and adopted, and Ben’s own dream of fatherhood feels impossibly out of reach. He’s attracted to Jason, but what’s the point? Besides the age difference and Jason’s lack of experience, they live thousands of miles apart. Ben wants more than a meaningless fling.
Then a hunted criminal on the run takes Jason’s daughter hostage, throwing Jason and Ben together in a dangerous search through endless miles of mountain forest. They’ll go to the ends of the earth to rescue Maggie – but what comes next? Can they build a new family together and find a place to call home?
Rating: Narration – A; Content – C
I’ve enjoyed a number of books by Keira Andrews over the last year or so and have definitely become a fan of her writing, so seeing lots of her novels coming out in audio over the past few months has given me a great opportunity to catch up with some of the titles I’ve missed. I loved Semper Fi, The Christmas Deal (recently released in audio with John Solo narrating) and Beyond the Sea – and I hoped to love Ends of the Earth which, from the sound of the blurb, promised a romantic suspense storyline. Sadly, however, I can’t report success with this one; the narration is stellar of course, but the story is weak and in places feels like it’s a cheesy made-for-TV movie.
Single dad Jason Kellerman has taken his eight-year-old daughter Maggie on the camping trip of her dreams, to the (fictional) Glacier National Park in Montana. Jason isn’t really a fan of camping, but Maggie is the apple of his eye, and there isn’t anything he wouldn’t do for her. It’s been just the two of them more or less since she was born; Amy, Jason’s best friend at high school, asked him to take her V-card and despite using protection something went wrong and she ended up pregnant. Not long after Maggie was born, Amy and her parents were killed in a car accident, and Jason has raised his daughter alone, giving up his dreams of art college and becoming estranged from his (sort of) well-meaning but interfering parents.
On their first day at the campsite, Jason and Maggie are going on a tour led by one of the park rangers, Ben Hettler, who is friendly and informative and really good with Maggie, answering all her many questions along the route. Jason can’t help being just a bit distracted by the handsome older man’s muscular physique, even as he tells himself the same thing he’s always told himself whenever he’s noticed a fit guy’s body – that it’s aesthetically pleasing to his artist’s eye.
Ben is forty-one (to Jason’s twenty-five) and had been looking forward to starting a family with his long term boyfriend – until said boyfriend dumped him after almost twenty years together. Although Ben is no longer in love with him, he’s still bitter over the fact that he’s started a family with his new husband – something Ben had craved, and which now seems out of reach. His love life since the break-up has consisted of the odd hook-up, and he hasn’t been interested in a relationship with anyone… until he meets Jason. Jason is cute and smart with a killer smile… and all wrong for him; he’s too young, he lives on the other side of the country – and yet, Ben can’t stop thinking about him or wanting to spend time with him and get to know him – and Maggie – better.
Ben does indeed find ways to spend a few hours with Jason and Maggie over the next few days. He can tell Jason is a bit flustered by him and that the attraction he’s feeling is mutual – but he also realises that Jason has almost no clue as to what he’s feeling and is very inexperienced. Jason is thrown completely by these new feelings; but it doesn’t take him long to realise the real reason for the butterflies in his stomach and his nervous babbling. He’d never considered he might not be straight, and then after Amy died, he put his own life on hold and hasn’t dated at all, feeling he shouldn’t date and that Maggie should be his entire focus. But now, faced with an older, hot park ranger… maybe he’s ready to consider the possibilties.
This first ‘getting-to-know-you’ part of the story is sweet and nicely done, even though the attraction between the two men does feel a bit unlikely. Then the suspense plot kicks in; Maggie is kidnapped by a wanted criminal (whom we actually meet in the prologue) who is trying to evade capture and decides to use Maggie as his human shield. Jason is, of course, frantic, and practically falls apart, weighed down by grief and guilt; Ben is just as fearful for Maggie, but is more pragmatic and shores Jason up, determined to find her at all costs.
The suspense part of the plot is well-done and isn’t dragged out, although I was rather surprised when it ended so many chapters before the end of the book (I don’t think that’s a spoiler – I mean, we know Maggie isn’t going to end up in a shallow grave in the woods, right?), which then moves off in another direction, as Jason and Ben finally get it on and then Jason spends weeks (months?) wallowing in guilt before he realises he does deserve love and a life of his own.
There are several things about the story that don’t quite ring true, the biggest of which is the romance. I like age-gap stories, and I’m not averse to sexual-awakening/first-time stories, but here, Jason was so oblivious and had been for so long, that for him to go from having no idea he was attracted to men to happily bottoming in less than a week just felt way too fast, and the relationship as a whole isn’t very well developed. His gradual acknowledgement of his attraction to Ben worked better than Ben’s almost love-at-first-sight reaction to Jason, and after we learn about the end of his long-term relationship, I couldn’t help wondering if Ben – who so desperately wanted a family – was in it as much for Maggie as he was for Jason!
On the plus side, Jason’s a great dad and Greg Boudreaux’s portrayal of Maggie has her coming across as cute and bright as a button rather than overly precocious and annoying! It won’t come as a surprise when I say that the narration is flawless in every respect, but what really captivated me here was the rendering of the emotional content of the story. Jason’s cute nervousness when around Ben is superbly judged, but the real tour de force comes during and after the kidnapping scenes; every parent’s nightmare is there in Mr. Boudreaux’s voice – the terror, the guilt, the despair – and in those moments, I was right there too. His portrayal of the two leads works really well (he gets Jason’s “dad voice” just right), and the different tones and timbres he uses for them contrast nicely. The pacing is spot on and the secondary characters are clearly differentiated; and while the performance couldn’t disguise the weaknesses in the story, it did at least enable me to get past them as I was listening.
Ends of the Earth isn’t going to make my list of favourite re-listens in spite of the fantastic narration. Perhaps the story would have worked better had it been a full-blown romantic suspense tale that allowed time for a bit more relationship development, or had the suspense plotline been dispensed with and the story been more about Jason’s learning that he was entitled to have a life and his dealing with his estrangement from his family. As it is though, it doesn’t quite work and I can’t really recommend it for anything other than the performance.
This review originally appeared at AudioGals.
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