Miranda's Big Mistake

By: Jill Mansell / Narrated By: Gabrielle Baker

Length: 14 hrs and 38 mins

I do love Jill Mansell, and this book is one of her best

Don’t be put off by the 14 hours and 38 minutes run time of Miranda’s Big Mistake. Yessss, it’s pretty long for a Romance, but it’s perfectly wonderful as a layered story with many characters getting air time.

What I like about Mansell is that she puts so much time and effort into developing her characters. And here we have a MULtitude of people who get into all sorts of fixes, and they each evolve and discover joy in life. What could be better than a gazillion and six Happily Ever Afters?

Miranda is a truly well-meaning wanna-be hairdresser at a high end and tony hair salon that caters to upper class and famous clients. From the opening we see that she’s been kinda keeping an eye out for the homeless dude on the street near where she works, and she often goes out to get him something to eat or to share her sandwich with him. She worries about him, and he, along with the occasional mad dash into the street to save a puppy, is one of the reasons she’s often late to work. Indeed, I found her boss Fen to be the soul of patience with her as her well-meaning self can rather come off as “feckless worker” as she sometimes scrambles to keep up at work.

She lives with Florence, an older woman who’s wheelchair bound due to painful arthritis. Florence is a good person who genuinely cares about people, and it’s through her that our other character Chloe is taken in. Chloe had the utter misfortune to get pregnant and was left by her husband Greg, who did NOT want children and views her as the reason their marriage dissolved.

It turns out that Miranda has met Greg (Pretty much on the night he moves out) at a party, and the two have an instant attraction and connection. He does NOT tell Miranda that he’s just left his pregnant wife, and as Chloe moves in with Miranda and Florence, the story has a great many instances of Greg aaaaaalmost being found out. This goes for hours of near misses, and I soon wondered if the enTIRE audiobook was going to be aaaaaall those near misses, and that I would’ve found to be tiresome and frustrating. After all, we’re talking 14+ hours of audiobook.

Soon, however, we get to Miranda discovering her big mistake, and it was to Chloe’s credit that she suffered far less than Miranda did. Enough to catch the eye of Fen, he who only dates rail-thin models and spoiled starlets. It’s his growing admiration of Chloe as she navigates being alone and pregnant that I found to be the most adorable and compelling of any of the book’s stories, even more so than Miranda’s. Miranda’s charm, however, lies in her many and varied escapades as she fails at so many things. I could see plenty of my own feckless flailing in her attempts to be a good and kind person, along with how she juggled the ins and outs of her love life (Reminded me oh so horrifically of those bad ol’ dating days).

Gabrielle Bakers turns in a fine performance, especially as Florence as the cogs in her mind spin and whir and she comes up with devious little schemes and plans for everybody. Plus Baker does male voices well, especially Fen when he thinks of Chloe and of the man he wants to be. Miranda has the many loves in her life, and Danny is a fine Hero, but really: That Fen/Chloe setup made the book for me.

I’ve gathered many a Jill Mansell audiobook in my Library, but I snatched Miranda’s Big Mistake up right quick to get as many Audible Escape package ya-yas out as possible before it went the way of the dodo bird as of November 1, 2020.

>Sigh<

So many Romances, so little time. And November 1 has come and gone.

Good thing I got a last Mansell audiobook in!