Title: For the Living
Author: L.A. Witt
Narrator: Charlie David
Publisher: Self-Published
Run Time: 8 hours and 4 minutes
Category: Contemporary
At a Glance: Charlie David has a smooth, if unvaried, voice, but the story is a bit off-putting in that Scott is required to be friend, confidant, lover, and analyst for Jay.
Reviewed By: Mike
Blurb: For the last year, Jay Warren has struggled to find the nerve to tell his wife he’s gay. Every time he gets the chance, though, he freezes up. He’s ashamed of hiding it all this time, he doesn’t want to hurt her, and the guilt has been almost unbearable.
When his wife dies suddenly, Jay’s conscience threatens to eat him alive.
Funeral director Scott Lawson deals with the bereaved every day, and he’s all too familiar with the inside of the closet. He offers Jay some much-needed compassion and understanding, and from that connection comes a friendship that quickly – perhaps too quickly – turns into something more.
But are grief, guilt, and loneliness the only things tying them together? Or, will Scott get fed up with being used as an emotional crutch before Jay realizes what he has?
Review: Jay Warren has been struggling for a year with how to tell his wife that he is gay and that he wants a divorce. He has been drinking to fight his guilt, and he has been distant because the truth could destroy them both emotionally. Then one night comes word that the unthinkable has happened—Jay’s wife has been killed in an accident.
Scott Lawson is a funeral director at the home where Jay’s wife, Misty, will afterwards be laid to rest. He’s gay, has been out for years, and has achieved a detente with his parents over his personal truth. So when Jay approaches him, needing someone who isn’t personally involved with his loss or guilt to hear him out, Scott is willing to help.
Things become an issue when the two men realize they have an attraction to one another. The problem gets more complicated when the attraction becomes deeper and impossible to ignore.
Charlie David gives the narration here the heart it deserves and the emotion it requires; however, his voices for the main characters are frequently so much the same that it can be hard to tell them apart until you get a verbal clue as to who is, or has been, speaking. Listeners should also be cautioned that David has not lost his regional, and sometimes exotic, pronunciations of random words, but those are small bumps. A second, and much more important caution, is the inescapable “theme music”. You can’t avoid it and it adds a level of soap opera that this book simply does not need—the crescendo and decrescendo between every single chapter became characters unto themselves. This does nothing for the book or the narration. I fully expected someone to begin each chapter with, “Despite our best efforts, the patient did not survive.” There is no way to avoid it, you can’t fast forward through it, you can only live with it. One hopes this does not become a trend in audiobooks. It is far too distracting.
Charlie David has a smooth, if unvaried, voice, but the story is a bit off-putting in that Scott is required to be friend, confidant, lover, and analyst for Jay. David does his best with those four tonal differences, so if you like him as a narrator, you will enjoy this book.
You can buy For the Living here:
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