A Return of Devotion

By: Kristi Ann Hunter / Narrated By: Beverley A. Crick

Length: 13 hrs and 3 mins

A fine sequel and, perhaps, simple stand-alone novel

Though I felt that Beverley A. Crick’s voice for Daphne made her sound sooooo day-dreamy as to be exasperating at times, I can’t fault the woman for her choice of tone. Daphne Blackmoor IS a woman who lives almost entirely in her own imagination, to the point where I coulda throttled her a time or two.

Make no mistake, I liked A Return of Devotion quite a bit. It’s just that here, Daphne comes off as a bit of an airhead whereas in A Defense of Honor she seems more nurturing if a tad squeamish—not about to dirty her hands on a gun or a knife even if everybody’s lives depended on her. I get that: All nurturer, and ooooother people can do the dirty work.

But in this novel, there’s a lot of work to be done as Haven Manor is being taken over by the rightful owner of the property, William, Marquis of Chemsford. Daphne flubs her way through their introduction to each other, stammering that she’s the housekeeper when, actually, she has pretty much zippo clue as to the nuts and bolts of running a household as large as the Manor. Plus, she hems and haws sooooo mightily about her past, the present, wheedles a bit about the future, that I wanted to smack her upside the head to wake her up.

And that’s the point. We’re SUPPOSED to wanna whack her upside the head. The way A Return of Devotion is written shows us the inner life of this woman who in the last book comes off as a trifle the martyr. Here, she’s just a desperate woman trying to manage in a world that she’s lived too long away from. Society is not her thing. Interacting with William is not her thing. Being forthright after living a life of deception for so long is not her thing.

But she has no choice, and we the listeners struggle and flounder along with her as she bravely tries to make her way through what is an entirely different future than what she had planned the past decade or so. Plus, she’s thrust into a complete and utter quandary as she tries to juggle loving her own son, but keeping him distanced from her, keeping him safely ensconced in the lie that Kit and she forged for the children who were raised at Haven Manor.

I liked the characters, and I could see how William could actually come to care about Daphne, it wasn’t a stretch, especially as HE had so many times wanted to do the whole whack-her-upside-the-head thing - A LOT. But as his own temperament thawed, and as his character grew? Well, yes. I could see the attraction; I could see Daphne in the light in which William came to see her.

There’s quite a bit of struggling that goes on in this book, and the Christian message comes through, though not as loud and clear (nor as harshly) as it did in the previous book of the series. And tho’ Crick’s narration of Daphne’s space-cadet routines made me wince at times, her performance for the rest of the book was jolly decent.

This audiobook just came out in February of this year (2019), so I guess it’ll be a while before I can satisfy myself with the next in the series.

Wha? There’s GOTTA be another one, right? We’ve stilllll got one character left hanging, and I DEMAND a Happy Ending there!!!