Julia Whelan is a screenwriter, lifelong actor, and award-winning audiobook narrator of over five hundred titles. Her performance of her own debut novel, the internationally bestselling My Oxford Year, garnered a Society of Voice Arts Award. Whelan is also a Grammy-nomiated audiobook director, a former writing tutor, a half-decent amateur baker, and a certified tea sommelier. You can find her online at jmwhelan.com.
For Sewanee Chester, being an audiobook narrator is a long way from her old dreams, but the days of being a star on film sets are long behind her. She's found success and satisfaction from the inside of a sound booth and it allows her to care for her beloved, ailing grandmother. When she arrives in Las Vegas last-minute for a book convention, Sewanee unexpectedly spends a whirlwind night with a charming stranger. On her return home, Sewanee discovers one of the world's most beloved romance novelists wanted her to perform her last book—with Brock McNight, the industry's hottest, most secretive voice. Sewanee doesn't buy what romance novels are selling—not after her own dreams were tragically cut short—and she stopped narrating them years ago. But her admiration of the late author, and the opportunity to get her grandmother more help, makes her decision for her. As Sewanee begins work on the book, resurrecting her old romance pseudonym, she and Brock forge a real connection, hidden behind the comfort of anonymity. Soon, she is dreaming again, but secrets are revealed, and the realities of life come crashing down around her once more. If she can learn to risk everything for desires she has long buried, she will discover a world of intimacy and acceptance she never believed would be hers.
Wow, where to even begin! Thank You for Listening is absolutely delightful. Part of this comes from how hilarious the banter is between the main characters, especially Sewanee and Brock. A huge chunk of the middle of the novel takes place over email and text communications between these two, as they navigate their friend and their work relationships. Somehow, Whelan is able to write banter that makes it feel like the characters are actually speaking to one another in the same room. And when they actually are, these characters seem to sparkle off the page, their jokes seem to crackle, and it seems impossible to read the book without laughing out loud.
Part of the reason the characters feel so funny is because they feel so real—in the sense that, it feels like you're talking to your best friend. Sewanee has a really interesting internal conflict that revolves all around acceptance of who she is now, versus who she was before her accident—and what makes this internal conflict really compelling is that we don't know what the accident was until halfway through the novel. So, we definitely get hooked by curiosity to know what happened, but we end up staying for the ride because this type of arc is one that we've all been living with in some capacity, and we want to know how it ends. I know I did, and I was incredibly gratified with how Sewanee found her peace with herself.
Thank You for Listening has a lot of tropes, and it definitely does play a bit on the romance genre—or Romance category, as it's called in the book. Whelan is able to critique the genre through Sewanee's eyes a bit, providing that cynical look on romance, without alienating readers of the genre from wanting to read this book. I think that's an incredible balance to strike that Whelan captures perfectly. Part of the reason reading this book is so fun, too, is that Sewanee and the romance hero are self-aware of the type of romance novel they're living, all the tropes they've embodied, and they still have every real conversations about the very real things they're living through to find themselves at that well-earned happily ever after.
I definitely want to check out Whelan's My Oxford Year now, and hope that Whelan continues to write such wonderful novels in the future. Definitely going to be a must-buy author for me! Until then, you can find her online at jmwhelan.com.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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