Audition by Amelia Wilde, Skye Warren Series: True North #1
Published by Book Beautiful LLC on 9th December 2019
Pages: 215
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Blood and sweat. Bethany Lewis danced her way out of poverty. She's a world class athlete... with a debt to pay.
Joshua North always gets what he wants. And the mercenary wants Bethany in his bed. He wants her beautiful little body bent to his will.
She doesn't surrender to his kiss.He doesn't back down from a challenge.It's going to be a sensual fight... to the death.
What draws me as always to Skye Warren’s books is the lyrical writing, so I know that ‘Audition’ will be a well-spun tale, at least when it comes to style. I’d been awaiting for this one with a little bit of trepidation, not because I generally liked Warren’s North Security series (I did) but because I hadn’t quite a good enough impression of Liam’s equally cynical younger brother to think he needed his own HEA.
Like the previous books in the establishing series, ‘Audition’ stayed on the edge of the morally questionable and never quite bloomed to become a fully fledged love story that I’d hoped would be grander and more convincing.
But what I found difficult wasn’t the forbidden tinge itself, but rather, the plot that always seemed shrouded in an attractive veil of mystery that I can’t seem to pierce—there was a back story that unfolded in bits and pieces—but put together so loosely spanning past and present that it felt like a fragmented shard of a complete narrative that I couldn’t seem to get. And that was Bethany’s and Joshua North’s relationship in a nutshell: a little danger, shady company, a mutual obsession since they met five years ago under equally shady circumstances, a repeating litany of doubting themselves and each other and Joshua’s personal self-recrimination of wanting Bethany while feeling filthy about it.
We’ve been given the bare bones and the points of conflict that surrounded them, but I couldn’t get past that their connection was road-blocked past dark desire. Joshua’s weirdly unhinged (and somewhat stalkerish) behaviour around Bethany while the thoughts he had about her stayed just that: lengthy inner monologues that didn’t change anything as he stayed an arse for most of it, mired too deep in his own inability and unwillingness to be invulnerable up until the end. Ironically, the most Joshua continued the repetitive notes of there being nothing good in him, the more and more I started to agree…because there weren’t any signs despite the struggles he had, that this was going to shift.
‘Audition’ had in essence, a (deliberate?) disjointedness storytelling here that threw me off, as much as I enjoyed the atmosphere, metaphor-laden writing. Still, I struggled to see past this nebulous relationship between Joshua/Bethany and it was this very lack of clarity that eventually hindered my whole enjoyment of this.
