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Malachi Keogh finds himself in a job he neither wanted nor asked for when his father, boss of Sydney’s postal service, sends him to the end of the business line, a.k.a. the Dead Letter Office. Malachi expects it to be tedious and boring, but instead discovers a warehouse with a quirky bunch of misfit co-workers, including a stoic and nerdy boss, Julian Pollard.
Malachi’s intrigued by Julian at first, and he soon learns there’s more to the man than his boring clothes of beige, tan, and brown; a far cry from Malachi’s hot pink, lilac, and electric blue. Where Julian is calm and ordered, Malachi is chaos personified, but despite their outward differences, there’s an immediate chemistry between them that sends Malachi’s head – and heart – into a spin.
To keep his father happy, Malachi needs to keep this job. He also needs to solve the mystery of the pile of old letters that sits in Julian’s office and maybe get to the bottom of what makes Julian tick. Like everything that goes through the mail center, only time will tell if Malachi has found his intended destination or if he’ll find himself returned to sender.
Rating: Narration – B; Content – B
Dearest Milton James is a charming and delightfully frothy contemporary romance in which the two leads fall in love while tracking down the author of a series of ‘lost’ letters written fifty years earlier. It’s an easy, undemanding listen, with a lot of humour and a lot of heart, and new-to-me narrator Glen Lloyd (a native Aussie, I believe) delivers an animated and engaging performance.
When the story begins, Malachi Keogh has been pretty much dragged by his father – the boss of Sydney’s postal service – into the office of Julian Pollard, head of the Mail Redistribution Centre, (which, despite being re-named a while back, is still colloquially known as “the Dead Letter Office”) – the place where all the city’s undeliverable mail ends up. Malachi has just been fired (again) – this time, because he stood up for a colleague who was being discriminated against – so his exasperated father pulls a few strings and gets Malachi this job with the warning that he’d better stick at it.
Malachi doesn’t expect to stick it out for the morning, let alone the whole day. He’s sure he’ll be bored out of his mind and will be chalking up yet another failure… but somehow, he finds himself actually interested in the work he’s given to do. It’s the job of the Mail Redistribution Centre to try to reunite as much of the ‘lost’ mail – letters, packets, parcels – with either the intended recipient or the sender, and when he helps to forward a birthday card to a little girl from her grandmother, he starts to realise that this can be a really rewarding job. It certainly doesn’t hurt that his boss is gorgeous – despite the fact his wardrobe seems to consist entirely of various iterations of beige – or that his colleagues are a likeable, quirky bunch he hits it off with straight away. Malachi is surprised to find himself actually looking forward to going into work each day.
When one of his colleagues mentions that there’s a pile of old letters in Julian’s office that have been around the warehouse for several decades (normally, the stuff that ends up there is disposed of after a year), Malachi is curious, asks Julian if he can read them – and discovers they’re love letters, written from one man to another back in 1972. Malachi is immediately captivated – the sentiments are both beautiful and tragic, given that the letters were written at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Australia. The love and longing felt by the writer for the object of his affections leaps off the page; every letter is addressed “Dearest Milton James”, and Malachi decides he wants to try to find out who sent them and who they were intended for. There’s not much to go on – but he wants to give it a try anyway, and Julian agrees to help.
Spending time together reading the letters and then coming up with clues and avenues of investigation gives Malachi and Julian the excuse they’ve both been looking for to spend time together. The attraction that sparked between them at their first meeting grows as they get to know each other and develops into a lovely, slow-burn romance with some nicely steamy moments and lots of genuine tenderness and affection.
Malachi and Julian are wonderfully endearing – very different but somehow a perfect fit. Malachi is gregarious, vibrant and funny, he loves to match the coloured streak in his hair to his shoes (or shoelaces), he rambles when he’s nervous and has practically no verbal filter, but he’s a gentle soul who feels things deeply. Julian is a real cinnamon roll; sweet, kind and straightforward, he enjoys his job and is mostly content with his ordinary – maybe a little bit bland – life, and Malachi bursts into his beige existence like an explosion of colour in more ways than one.
Dear Milton James is a cute, feel-good romance without any manufactured conflict or angst, the characters are well-written and likeable, and I loved the way the search for the mysterious Milton James worked out, with everyone at the Redirection Office bringing their own special talents to the project, and a neat and unexpected twist I didn’t see coming.
One word of caution however; the degree to which you enjoy this one may depend on how much you like big, larger-than-life personalities who blurt out whatever comes into their head and never shut up, and for me, Malachi was skating pretty close to the edge of my tolerance for the type. He’s a lot of fun, he has a great sense of humour and his heart is in the right place, but his incessant chatter is a bit OTT. He and Julian make a great couple – Malachi needs someone quieter and calmer to ground him and stop him bouncing off the walls and Julian needs someone to liven things up a bit – but I did sometimes wonder how Julian was going to cope with the constant verbal diarrhoea and lack of filter.
I’ve listened to a number of audiobooks by N.R. Walker, but somehow, I’ve picked up mostly the US-set ones – which Nick J. Russo usually narrates – and none of the Australian-set ones. Glen Lloyd has narrated several of those, and I was pleased to have the opportunity to listen to him, and to hear an authentic Australian accent used throughout the story. It’s a strong performance overall, with clear differentiation between all the characters – male and female – and well-judged vocal characterisations. Malachi is the sole PoV character, and Mr. Lloyd’s interpretation of him – bright, bubbly, cheeky and chatty – works really well. Even though he talks a mile a minute, there’s no tripping over of words and the text is clearly enunciated. I did notice, however, that there’s no (or very little) difference in tone or timbre between Malachi’s dialogue and his narrative, so I was sometimes unable to work out if he was speaking or thinking to himself – and with a character who tends to say whatever he thinks, that was quite an important distinction to be missing. Julian’s voice is lower in pitch with a lot of warmth to it, and his speech is a bit slower and more considered, which is a good fit for his character, and the scenes between the two of them really conveyed their chemistry and emotional connection. The supporting cast is nicely done, too – I particularly liked the portrayal of Denise, the fork-lift driver, whose gravelly tones made me think she was probably on forty a day (!), and the way he voices the letter-writer. It’s a good, solid performance, and I’ll definitely be seeking out more of Glen Lloyd’s work.
If you’re looking for something light-hearted, warm-hearted and sexy with a beige/neon pairing (!) that will tug at the heartstrings, too, then Dearest Milton James may be just the ticket.
This review originally appeared at AudioGals.
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