The Nothing Girl

The Nothing Girl

Series: The Frogmorton Farm Series, Book 1

By: Jodi Taylor / Narrated By: Lucy Price-Lewis

Length: 9 hrs and 47 mins

This gem of an audiobook has a little of EVERYthing in it!

The first time I listened to The Nothing Girl, I was an unabashed loather of all things even VAGUELY having a whiff of romance in ‘em. And I loved the book.

Now here I am, a couple of years later, an unabashed lover of all things with (desperately clean) romance in ‘em. And I loved the book yet again!

It’s a journey of self-discovery, AND it has the golden horse, Thomas, that only Jenny, our heroine can see (It’s like this: 13-year old Jenny’s life is miserable, she has a stutter, chronically cannot stand herself, and she plans to off herself. Enter Thomas, the golden horse only she can see, to be there for her, as a friend, as a guidance counselor, even, as she gets older, a wingman of sorts). If you think I’m passing on a book that has a horse in it, golden or otherwise, you’re SOREly mistaken. Especially a horse of Thomas’s caliber, one with a razor sharp wit, an unerring eye for getting Jenny into scrapes like, say, marriage!

Because Jenny does get married, to the rather irresponsible, wholly unmanageable Russell Checkland. He offers marriage to her as a way to get money to fix the home he loves in exchange for offering her that home, a place where she can be someone other than the quiet, fearful woman she is when she’s at home living in her overprotective aunt and uncle’s care. Yeh, that sounds pretty cold and callous, but it’s not really. Bringer-of-Chaos tho’ he might be, Russell absolutely believes that Jenny is not a Nothing Girl, and through their interactions and exchanges as the story progresses, we see Jenny coming to believe that, and we see Russell coming to see that even more clearly, even as he tries to get over his last girlfriend, Jenny’s cousin.

Life at Frogmorton Farm is anything but dull. There’s the fixing up of the place to do, plus it and Jenny and Russell seem to be magnets for misfits of all sorts. Those with four-legs, those with two. I LOVE THAT! Gimme a warm-hearted story of people opening their homes, opening their lives to love and be loved and I am sooo totally there. The Nothing Girl has that in spades, so I was a desperately happy camper!

Lucy Price-Lewis does a spot-on job with the narration. Rather than deliver Jenny with a stutter, she delivers pauses before speaking, hesitations that simply shriek: I’m afraid! Then too she does the rescued donkey, Marilyn’s, bray so fearlessly. This is no mean feat as Marilyn is just waaay off, brays like a freight train, poor darling girl. Price-Lewis’s narration is just a treat, period.

There’s a bit of a mystery that starts after the marriage, and it builds into a twist at the end which I didn’t see coming (But actually, perhaps that’s not saying much as I’m a Notoriously Oblivious Git). There’s the development of Jenny and Russell as individuals and as a couple. There’s the unfolding of Jenny’s personality, her facing of fears. There’s even a good chunk of grief thrown in there that left me with a lump in my throat.

I’d listened to Just One Damned Thing After Another quite some time before, and I liked that one very much indeed. Imagine how happy I was, therefore, that here came another story, so different, with another heroine, so different.

And Ms. Taylor had me at Thomas’s first whinny!



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