McFarland’s Farm (Hope #1) Audio/Audible Version
Rating: 4 Stars
Publisher: The Romance Authors
Genre: Gay Romance
Tags: Audible Version, Contemporary, Series
Length: Audible Version (Novella)
Reviewer: Paul
Purchase At: amazon.com
Blurb:
Wealthy, attractive Lucas Reika treats life like a party, moving from bar to bar and man to man. Thumbing his nose at his restaurateur father’s demand that he earn his keep, Lucas instead seduces a valued employee in the kitchen of their flagship restaurant, earning himself an ultimatum: lose access to his father’s money or stay in the middle of nowhere with a man he has secretly lusted over from afar. Quiet, hard-working Jared McFarland loves his farm on the outskirts of Hope, Arizona, but he aches to have someone to come home to at the end of the day. Jared agrees to take in his longtime crush as a favor. But when Lucas invades his heart in addition to his space, Jared has to decide how much of himself he’s willing to risk and figure out if he can offer Lucas enough to keep him after his father’s punishment is over.
Review:
Audiobook Reviews for the LGBT community.
It’s great for the vision impaired or other people with reading disorders who are slowly getting more access to LGBT and M/M literature via access to more Audiobooks finally being read and released into our small community.
I haven’t been able to read for six years and it had a seriously profound effect on me as I was an avid reader. Now I have that back again through Audiobooks and it’s just indescribable. I was never blinded or unable to see properly either, but had my cognition decimated. I just couldn’t retain a single thing.
I never bothered with Audiobooks because I found it hard enough to follow conversations, UNTIL that fateful day back in January where I finally bought an Audiobook and it was going in one ear and straight out the other, so out of pure annoyance I put my headphones in because someone had their TV turned up too loud and BAM. My life was switched back. I was able to block everything else out and concentrate on that one voice and it not only worked, but with other advances like immersion reading I’m learning how to read again and retain what I’m reading. This technology is rapidly getting growing, so much so that within this last year alone, text to speech has become tolerable as they’ve worked out inflections within a sentence and that one feat in itself has made so many books I couldn’t read available to me now and the software behind it is growing at an amazing rate. But nothing beats the voice of another person and it never will. Due to demand, as more people within the general population are using Audiobooks now while driving, exercising, walking the dog, doing housework or even while they’re gardening. Like me they’re doing this on their phone. You don’t even need to buy a kindle anymore if you’re restricted to Audiobooks.
All of the LGBT community can benefit from this too with features like Whispersync for Voice through Amazon, but they’re not the only ones doing it now either. You can flip from your page in the book to the exact same word on your Audiobook and back to reading again in the blink of an eye.
Packed trains are a great example if you’re reading a saucy novel and you don’t have to bother with people reading over your shoulder. But be careful with your saucy romance novels, you don’t want to find yourself dry humping someone as the book carries you away 🙂 We’re slowly winning and getting more books read, every single one of them counts as a win and Audiobooks are now something for everyone. For us being an even smaller community within a small one already, this makes it hard. Ideally it would be great to get all LGBT literature that’s published, now to be heard. We need to do it professionally and I know this is expensive. So if I could ask every author who writes for the LGBT community no matter what genre to try and have their favourite book made into an Audiobook I think that would be a great place to start and if you can’t pick one, then ask your fans to pick one for you. I’ll be honest and say that it needs to be done professionally though, as listeners are picky.
Audiobooks have a high return rate simply due to the fact that if people don’t like the voice, they return them. I’d also like to say that I’ve seen a few blind romance novels out there too, but I couldn’t read them. Hmm, lol.
I suggest if you take up this challenge I’ve thrown down, be true to your characters that you’ve created in your minds eye. Make them sound how you envisioned them to be while you crafted and moulded them. A lot of romance novels involve hardened cops, military people, bad boys on the run. Harsh dystopian worlds, fantasy lands and sci-fi. Then you have kinky books and DBSM novels.
No matter what the genre is at all, I think the key to a great Audiobook is matching your characters to how you’ve portrayed them via your narrator. Most importantly though, listen to a few to get a feel of how you’d like your Audiobook to sound. Listen to a few for research. There’s always going to be someone who doesn’t like the voice you choose.
McFarlands Farm (Hope Book 1), by Cardeno. C –
Audiobook Review.
With the deployment of one carefully crafted phone call, 24 year old Lucas Reika’s life was changed forever. The L.A. bad boy’s days of living off his charming good looks, limit free credit cards and brazen lifestyle of playing the field amongst L.A.’s most elite had come to an abrupt end, caught in the act of his unabashed final depraved stunt.
He was to inherent his fathers flagship restaurant empire in LA worth millions, but he was banished instead. In a last ditch attempt to stop his exile. Susan, Lucas’s half sister had one final tactic in mind. She found her father and said, send him to Jared.
Her father still respected her ex-husband and agreed, the farmer who supplied him with the best quality produce for his exclusive restaurants was a good man.
The next day Lucas arrived by bus with nothing, in the small township of Hope in rural Arizona to redeem himself for the final time. There would be someone waiting for him, it had to be a joke. Hanging back near the diner, a huge man with a scarred face waited patiently, drinking his coffee and eyeing Lucas as he alighted from the bus. He’d secretly lusted over Lucas for years.
The receiver of that call hung up the phone baffled and confused, he’d just let his ex-wife steamroll him into agreeing that he would take in Lucas. The giant man who was a scarred faced farmer, was also a bit of a recluse.
Jared McFarland was taking in Lucas? Susan said that their father, Jared’s biggest client and the man who took a chance on him to get established had only agreed to his son’s final chance if Jared accept to have him. He was shocked to find it was Susan’s idea and her father agreed when she had told him her plan, so he reneged on his planned exile for his son and agreed with her.
Susan was the only real friend Jared had left and he agreed to do it for her. After being high school sweethearts that went onto marry. It had failed as he realised he was gay. He’d caved into her pleas to him on the phone. Susan won him over quickly to help delay her thankless half brother from being cut off from the family for good.
“Lucas splattered semen all over the prep table in my fathers flagship restaurant before the Saturday night dinner rush. My father had to find a new chef and new head hostess. He not only would do that to Lucas, he did do it. I had to beg him to give Lucas another chance.” She paused. “Beg. And the little shit didn’t even bother to thank me.”
“And you’re sending your brother to stay with me was the only way you could think of to torture him?”
Jared had always found Lucas very attractive but considered him way out of his league, with his devastatingly good looks, piercing blue eyes and cocksure swagger, they’d met, but what would Lucas think of him.
After petulant, childish greeting the moment Lucas stepped off the bus, followed by a subsequent few uncomfortable days after arriving. Lucas’s blatant rude manner toward Jared and the people around them slowly began to fade. After a demanding phone call to his father to send a car to pick him up immediately, Lucas was shocked with what his father had said to him and realised why no one was coming to get him, but to an unknowing Jared, Lucas was trying everything in his power not to ogle the giant man every time he was near. That he too found Jared’s brawn and beautiful nature almost too much to handle.
Cardeno. C. popular new novella McFarlands Farm (Hope book 1), is now available as an Audiobook. It’s a story of two lonely men who are forced together under unusual circumstances and after a few tense days begin to relax into each others company, the lonely hermit and the vacuous 24 year old rich city kid, slowly begin to fall into a routine after Lucas realised that he had no where to go, but does he really want to leave anymore? They talked nightly, slowly getting to know each other and begin to enjoy each others company, but neither of them realised that they were both as equally smitten with each other.
“That thought reminded Lucas of cocks, so, instinctively, he lowered his gaze to Jared’s groin and saw something he wasn’t expecting — a tent in Jared’s boxers. When Lucas’s brain woke up enough to process where he was and who he was ogling, he jerked his gaze up. The full moon shone into the kitchen through the three huge windows lining the walls. A beam sleep over Jared’s face, showing his parted lips, flush cheeks, and wide eyes, which were focused on Lucas’s quickly swelling dick”
McFarlands Farm (Hope book 1) is a like watching a slow dance between two awkward, guarded men. Slowly as they let their walls down a surprising a calmness descends over them as they find that solace is replacing the emptiness within them.
It’s a story about a yearning, one that’s being filled yet neither knew just how deep it ran. I’m happy to see that there is another book on the way. It might be a novella but it manages to keep a slow but steady pace. Whether or not you’re Cardeno. C fan, if you’re desperate for some quick, happy loving to move forward, stop on this book for one big warm fuzzy. Another welcome addition to get more much needed Audiobooks onto the shelves of the tiny M/M market.
Audible review copy supplied by the author in return for an honest review.
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Thank you so much for the review, Paul. Very good points you make and I’m glad you enjoyed McFarland’s Farm 🙂
Thanks for asking me to do it Kazza, I really enjoyed but I was a touch rusty.
Not rusty at all, Paul. It’s terrific and heartfelt.
I second that.
Very nice review of what I can tell is a very good story. Thank you so much for the review, Paul.
Thanks Cindi, I really enjoyed doing this very much, it’s been a long time.
Hi Paul, it is a lovely story. I am looking forward to more from Cardeno C too. It’s wonderful to hear your rediscovery of reading through audio books. I haven’t had the chance to try them yet and I certainly would if I had occasion to listen uninterrupted.
Great review!
I’m glad you enjoyed that Judy, I’m very passionate about Audiobooks because of what they have given me back and because this genre is considered small within the literary community. Not enough novels are progressing onto Audiobooks within the LGBT community and that’s something I’d really like to help change. It’s hard for the authors to get access to do this properly so every single book we get recorded is a win for everyone. The LGBT community is missing out. The amount of books you can listen too while doing really mundane things like washing, vacuuming, dishes to ironing can… Read more »