Moonstone Beach

Author: Linda Seed

Narrator: Avie Paige

A charming modern romance, Moonstone Beach by Linda Seed is a relatively quick read that keeps you interested the whole time. This is the first in a series set in Cambria, a fictional tourist trap city in California. Kate Bennet is a bookstore owner who is two years out of a divorce and she’s finally feeling like it’s time to get back into the dating game. Her friends agree and they all get together to help Kate find a quick fling. It doesn’t go well for her, much to the delight of Jackson Graham, a prickly local chef who has had a long-term crush on Kate since before she was divorced. Jackson sees his opportunity and gets set up with Kate through mutual friends but he refuses to move quickly with her, which was unexpected considering his past with women. Will his career come in the way of their budding love? Will her past trauma cause problems between them? Luckily, all is answered by the end of the novel with a promised HEA and no cliffhangers. 

This novel is quite sweet. The MCs don’t start out as enemies, but they’re not exactly friends, either. There’s a bit of tension between them at the start of the novel but that’s quickly wiped away once Jackson decides he wants to actually pursue Kate. There’s some spice towards the end of the story, just two sex scenes, so mostly it’s about their dates and the time they spend growing closer to each other. Though there are the typical issues with communication between the MCs, they do end up working through everything once they have a conversation about it. I personally appreciated seeing that; it’s nice to see healthy communication being promoted in literature.

The narrator, Avie Paige, did a great job bringing the characters to life. Her performance is fairly straightforward with easy to distinguish character voices and a good flow and tone to her narration. I didn’t detect any issues with production for this audiobook.

This is the first time I’ve read anything by the author, Linda Seed, and I’m now excited to listen to the rest of the novels in this series. Though her characters are fairly standard for a romance novel set in modern times, her descriptions are intricate enough to bring every scene to life and the humor she’s put in the novel is quite apparent. 

I received this audiobook at no-cost fromAdoptAnAudiobook.com. The gifting of this audiobook did not affect my opinion of it.