4/28/2022

🎧 Legacy by Nora Roberts

This time, the narrator used her voice in a bit different way. More softened, not as thrilled as she sounded in another audiobook. But still, I had my pleasure listening to it and it was again a wonderful-created novel by Nora Roberts. And I am sure that at some point I will also read the print edition just for the fun of it. And because for me it is often the best way to get a story in completely.

Legacy

by Nora Roberts
Publisher Macmillan Audio on May 25, 2021
Narrator January LaVoy
Genre Novel
Length 14 hours and 57 minutes
Source Purchased, Audible
Goodreads
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Adrian Rizzo was seven when she met her father for the first time. That was the day he nearly killed her - before her mother, Lina, stepped in. Soon after, Adrian was dropped off at her grandparents’ house in Maryland, where she spent a long summer drinking lemonade, playing with dogs, making a new best friend - and developing the stirrings of a crush on her friend’s 10-year-old brother. Lina, meanwhile, traveled the country promoting her fitness brand and turning it into a billion-dollar business. There was no point in dwelling on the past. A decade later, Adrian has created her own line of yoga and workout videos, following in Lina’s footsteps but intent on maintaining creative control. And she’s just as cool-headed and ambitious as her mother. They aren’t close, but they’re cordial - as long as neither crosses the other. But while Lina dismisses the death threats that Adrian starts getting as a routine part of her daughter’s growing celebrity, Adrian can’t help but find the vicious rhymes unsettling. Year after year, they keep arriving - the postmarks changing, but the menacing tone the same. They continue after she returns to Maryland and becomes reacquainted with Raylan, her childhood crush, all grown up and as gorgeously green-eyed as ever. Sometimes it even seems like the terrifying messages are indeed routine like nothing will come of them. Until the murders start, and the escalation begins...

Story

Adrian needs to prove that she can create something without the help of her famous mother. And make it a success. Her way of doing Yoga and teaching it to others is different from the way how her mother does it. And so, it doesn´t take long before both have a serious conversation about how different they see life and family. And for Adrian, it means that she no longer wants the hectic life New York offers.

Style

Well, this time the audiobook sounds a little quieter in tone and atmosphere, but other than that, January LaVoy's voice was once again brilliant and incredibly versatile. How she lets you forget that it is only one person reading the novel. And I am still guessing about how the narrator can let her voice sound the way she sounds with Lina, Adrian, and all the other figures. Her performance has clarity and brilliance and yet sounds completely different from the other audiobook where I heard her voice for the very first time.

Characters

Adrian is in many ways like her mother. Like Lina, she knows what she wants, how she wants it, and what to do to achieve it. But unlike her mother, Adrian needs her family more than anything else in the world. Her grandparents, the place in Maryland where her mother was born and raised. For her, life is more than having a successful career. She wants a family, kids, and a career. It was absolutely entertaining to listen to the novel and to hear how the main figure got what she wanted.

Conclusion

This novel shows in an entertaining way how health, mind, and the will to get everything in life a person could possibly want, can be achieved. It was a pleasure to listen to the outstanding voice of January LaVoy again, although this time the atmosphere and sound were different.

Happy listening

Nora Roberts

Nora Roberts, born in Silver Spring, Maryland, is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than 200 novels. During the now-famous blizzard, she pulled out a pencil and notebook and began to write. It was there that a career was born. Several manuscripts and rejections later, her first book, Irish Thoroughbred, was published by Silhouette in 1981. Having spent her life surrounded by men, Ms. Roberts has a fairly good view of the workings of the male mind, which is a constant delight to her readers. It was, she’s been quoted as saying, a choice between figuring men out or running away screaming. Nora is a member of several writer’s groups and has won countless awards from her colleagues and the publishing industry. Recently The New Yorker called her “America’s favorite novelist.” She is also the author of the bestselling futuristic suspense series written under the pen name J. D. Robb. There are more than 500 million copies of her books in print.

January LaVoy

January LaVoy, born in Trumbull, Connecticut, is an American actress, most recognized as Noelle Ortiz on the ABC daytime drama One Life to Live. LaVoy made her Broadway debut in the Broadway premiere of the play Enron at The Broadhurst Theatre on April 27, 2010. She has appeared on and Off-Broadway, in regional theaters across the country, and guest-starred on several prime-time network series, including Elementary, Blue Bloods, and N0S4A2. She is a proud member of Actors' Equity Association and SAG-AFTRA and is a full-time faculty member in the Department of Theater and Dance at Emory University. January LaVoy is an AudioFile Magazine “Golden Voice” since May 2019. She has an extensive body of work in both narration and commercial voiceover. With hundreds of audiobook titles to her credit, she has received more than thirty Earphones Awards, eighteen Audie Award nominations (including seven wins), and was named Publishers Weekly's "Audiobook Narrator of the Year" for 2013. Her voice has been heard in national campaigns for dozens of products, and she shares a 2020 Grammy nomination with Meryl Streep and the cast of the Charlotte’s Web audiobook, in which she plays the title role of Charlotte.

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