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As a wildlife photographer, Journey “JJ” Sutton never stays in one place too long. The world is his classroom, and he’s living his dream. His only regret is that he had to sacrifice the love of his life to do it. But as the saying goes, you can never go home again. That’s until there’s a family emergency, and he has to…well, go home again. His easy breezy lifestyle gets complicated fast. It certainly doesn’t help that his ex-fiancé has bought the house next door.
After an unstable childhood, Cameron Foster loves small-town life. He has everything he needs in his vet practice, his friends, and his animals. Despite what numerous exes seem to think, he’s not still in love with Journey. And so what if they add “benefits” to their friendship? As long as he keeps his heart out of the equation, everything should be fine.
Too bad Journey’s not onboard with that plan. With summer ending, he has to convince Cameron that this is more than just a fling. This time around, he knows what he wants. He wants a second chance. He wants forever. Most of all, he wants Cameron’s heart.
Journey may have put away his passport, but things are just getting interesting.
Rating: Narration – B-; Content – B-
I confess that I initially thought Coddiwomple was a made-up word, but it turns out it isn’t! It means “to travel in a purposeful manner towards a vague destination”, and it’s the perfect title for this second chance romance in which a globetrotting photographer comes back to the home town – and the man – he left years before only to discover that life has a way of bringing you back to where you’re supposed to be.
For well over a decade, Journey Sutton – usually known as JJ – has travelled the world, making a name for himself (and a good living) as a wildlife photographer. It’s what he’d always dreamed of; living an unencumbered life away from the small Florida town of Coral Cove and the family responsibilities that had been dumped on him at a young age, following the death of his mother and his father’s descent into alcoholism – and he has no regrets. Well, maybe one. The man he left behind. The man he’d planned to marry.
Cameron Foster likes his life as a small-town veterinarian, although his love life hasn’t been quite as successful. After a childhood and adolescence spent moving from place to place as his father collected and discarded wives (!) Cameron was finally able to put down roots and gain some stability when he went to live with his stepmother Rosy. Falling in love and planning to make a life with the man he loved was just the icing on the cake – until it wasn’t, and JJ left town to follow his dream.
That was more than a decade earlier, when they were both in their mid-twenties. Now approaching forty, both JJ and Cam have had other relationships, but none that have ‘stuck’ – which, Cam’s exes insist, is because he’s still in love with the-one-that-got-away – an assertion Cam most heartily refutes.
When Coddiwomple begins, JJ is working on the Skeleton Coast of Namibia when, at the end of the day’s shoot, he receives an unexpected phone call from his brother John, who tells him their father has had a stroke and, with barely veiled sarcasm, suggests he might want to come home. It’s clear from this that JJ’s taken a lot of shit over the years for leaving and staying away, but he’s not about to argue about it and makes his way back to the US. John had already told him that Cam would be picking him up from the airport –but he didn’t tell JJ he’d be staying with Cam, who now owns the house next-door to their dad’s. JJ had no idea that Cam had bought it – or that Cam’s engagement to his fiancée Charlotte is over, but he’s too tired to parse it after the thirty hour trip, and thinks to make sense of it later.
JJ goes to the hospital to see his dad the next day, and is given the good news that he’s recovering well and is ready to return home. The nurse blithely assumes JJ will be his dad’s caregiver, but JJ can’t be responsible for him. Not only do they not get along well, his job requires him to be elsewhere and he’s not planning on sticking around. His brothers all cry off, citing other responsibilities – children, work etc. – but when JJ suggests employing someone to take care of their dad, John’s reaction is to accuse him of wanting to throw money at the problem until it goes away because he just wants an easy life. JJ manages to keep a lid on his temper – barely – but he has no intention of slipping back into the role he’d been forced to assume in his younger days, that of responsible adult and family fixer. He’s learned to put himself first now, and is determined not to get sucked back into his old ways.
Meanwhile, Cam is trying hard to fight all the old feelings for JJ that have come rushing back. They split up because they wanted different things from life, and obviously still do; JJ has decided he’ll stay for the summer and then, once his dad is further down the road to recovery, he’ll be off, back to his life and his photography and his very rare visits to Coral Cove. But it’s a tough fight when the heart wants what it wants, especially when JJ is as funny and charming and flirtatious (and hot!) as ever, and has made it very clear that he wouldn’t be at all opposed to finding his way back into Cam’s bed. But, Cam wonders, could he do that? Have a fling with JJ without becoming emotionally involved – all the while knowing he’ll be leaving again?
No prizes for guessing the answer to that one – and of course we all know how the ‘lets-do-sex-without-feelings’ thing is going to go for these guys, but the fun with tropes is in finding out how authors work with them in order to reach the HEA. There are no surprises here, so if you’re looking for a somewhat predictable but sexy and largely angst-free story, then this might be right up your alley. The reasons for Cam and JJ’s break-up are well-articulated and make sense; Cam needed to stay and put down roots while JJ needed to leave and live for himself after spending so much of his life living for others, and it’s obvious that with such diametrically opposed views, even if JJ hadn’t left, they would probably have split up anyway. I liked Cam and JJ individually and enjoyed their dynamic as a couple, but I didn’t feel the soul-deep connection between them I was asked to believe in, and the conflict in the romance, which is based entirely around Cam’s fear of being left alone (again) with a broken heart, is flimsy. I get not wanting to put yourself through that again, but these two aren’t kids; they’re almost forty with much more life experience under their belts now, and they should have been adult enough to talk about things instead of what actually happens, which is Cam jumping to conclusions in order to throw in a bit of last-minute angst.
One thing that works really well, however, is the relationship between JJ and his dad. They’ve never been close and there’s obviously a lot of unresolved hurt and tension between them, but the author manages to create a very real and caring relationship which slowly evolves into understanding and forgiveness, and it’s really well done. I could happily have smacked JJ’s brothers for their blinkered selfishness though, and I was pleased when Cam stood up for JJ and set them straight. (Although I really think JJ should have had that particular heart-to-heart with them himself.)
I’ve enjoyed a number of Nick Hudson’s narrations in the past and have given him good grades, but something about his performance in Coddiwomple didn’t quite ‘gel’ for me, and I’m not sure what it was – perhaps he just wasn’t the right choice for this particular book? He has a pleasant, mid-range voice, and technically, he’s fine – pacing, enunciation and character differentiation are all good, although his female character voices are… not great; some of them are very falsetto-y and caricaturish here. I liked his portrayal of the two leads, which are nicely contrasted in terms of pitch and timbre, but I noticed a certain very repetitive intonation throughout that quickly became distracting, to the point that I was almost listening out for IT rather than the words being spoken. I also spent quite a lot of the first part of the story wondering where the humour and snark I associate with S.E. Harmon had gone – and then I realised that it was there in the words, but it just wasn’t coming across in the performance. It really pains me to say it, but while this is by no means a bad narration, it doesn’t reach the standard I’ve come to expect from this narrator. Ultimately, I liked, but didn’t love Coddiwomple, but although it wasn’t quite the great listen I’d been hoping for, I remain a fan of both author and narrator and will certainly be reading/listening to more of their work.
This review originally appeared at AudioGals.
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