Title: Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert
Narrated By: Adjoa Andoh
Release Date: November 5th, 2019
Format: Audiobook (10 hrs and 17 mins)
Genre: Contemporary Romance, Chick Lit
Blurb: Chloe Brown is a chronically ill computer geek with a goal, a plan, and a list. After almost – but not quite – dying, she’s come up with seven directives to help her “Get a Life”, and she’s already completed the first: finally moving out of her glamorous family’s mansion. The next items?
Enjoy a drunken night out.
Ride a motorcycle.
Go camping.
Have meaningless but thoroughly enjoyable sex.
Travel the world with nothing but hand luggage.
And…do something bad.
But it’s not easy being bad, even when you’ve written step-by-step guidelines on how to do it correctly. What Chloe needs is a teacher, and she knows just the man for the job.
Redford “Red” Morgan is a handyman with tattoos, a motorcycle, and more sex appeal than 10,000 Hollywood heartthrobs. He’s also an artist who paints at night and hides his work in the light of day, which Chloe knows because she spies on him occasionally. Just the teeniest, tiniest bit.
But when she enlists Red in her mission to rebel, she learns things about him that no spy session could teach her. Like why he clearly resents Chloe’s wealthy background. And why he never shows his art to anyone. And what really lies beneath his rough exterior….
*Sighing* It is me, not the book. I just don’t seem to really connect the British Rom-Coms.The narrator did a great job, the plot of the story was a good one but the characters just didn’t engage me.
Chloe Brown is a website designer who was roughing it in life. Chloe has Fibromyalgia, a chronic and debilitating disease which kept her in constant pain. She needed pain killers daily life and the side effects were off putting to even her closest friends. Thanks to her health, her inner circle dwindled to just her two sisters and her grandma. After almost getting run over by a car, Chloe decides that she was done just barely surviving, she wants to really live!
Chloe moved out of her family’s home and into her own space, where she meets the super of her building, Redmond ‘Red’ Morgan. The two of them make quick but incorrect assessments of the other and so Chloe and Red think very lowly of the other.
In her bid to add some excitement to her life, Chloe makes a List of things she wants to and enlists Red’s help to achieve them. Then the reader got to learn more about both character’s journey thus far. Red was a lot more complex than he initially appeared and the reader was able to understand his reasons for mistrusting Chloe.
They seem to get on each other’s nerves but there was also a physical attraction that has been building and that chemistry allowed them to really bond with each other.
The author did a great job portraying a woman dealing with a chronic medical issue and a man escaping a painful past. What appeared like a cute romantic comedy actually dealt with some serious issues like mental abuse, body image and interracial romance. Talia Hibbert interwove these topics with humor so it didn’t feel so heavy or preachy.
The problem for me is that I knew things were supposed to be funny, but they didn’t tickle my funny bone. It’s like that for me with a lot of British authors. I just don’t connect with the humor and sometimes the writing even though I get the main point of their story. I did think this story was well done and I would recommend this book to all despite my indifference.
The story was writing so well and this narrative was so authentic as it drew on current issues/events pertaining lands considered sacred to Native Americans. My only issue was that there wasn’t enough romance in this first book to balance the heaviness of the controversial themes.
