4 Crowns
Date Finished: 11/08/2016
Book Synopsis
Adam and Diana have been married for five years and are now heading straight toward divorce. Diana insists she no longer loves him. Adam refuses to sign the papers. Unfortunately for both of them, their personal life and professional life are tangled together since they work at her family’s company.
Diana wants a clean break. Adam wants thirty days alone with his wife before he agrees to anything.
During this time apart, Diana discovers a side of Adam she never truly knew. Adam is dominant and he never believed she would accept that part of him. Instead of trusting her, he hid it, and that secrecy helped destroy their marriage.
They agree to the thirty days with a promise of divorce afterward. But isolation, honesty, and a few unexpected complications force them to confront truths neither of them was prepared for.
My Take
Both Adam and Diana walked into the thirty days convinced nothing would really change. They thought they would survive the arrangement, sign the papers, and move on with their lives.
Except the feelings were never actually gone.
I really liked them together. Diana didn’t want Adam because she stopped loving him. She wanted a divorce because she felt alone in her marriage. Adam thought he was protecting her by hiding who he was, when in reality that distance is exactly what pushed her away.
His biggest mistake was deciding for her instead of trusting her.
Watching them slowly realize that they were never actually honest with each other was what made the story work for me. The past timelines blended well with the present and explained why their relationship broke instead of just telling us it did.
The characters were flawed in a believable way. They weren’t just discovering things for the reader. They were discovering them for themselves.
Narrator
The audiobook of Marriage Games by C.D. Reiss is narrated by Sebastian York and Elena Wolfe.
I really enjoy dual narration, and I am seeing it more often lately. Having male characters voiced by a male narrator and female characters by a female narrator makes conversations feel natural.
Sebastian York has a very pleasant voice, but he reads fairly monotone. You can tell the difference between characters mostly by volume rather than vocal inflection. It still works and is easy to listen to, but it is not the most dynamic performance I have heard from him.
Elena Wolfe complements him well and adds emotional depth to Diana’s perspective.
Recommendation
I was completely invested in their emotional progression and honestly thought this was heading toward a resolution.
It did not.
Cliffhanger.
I was emotionally prepared for reconciliation after all their personal revelations and the book just stopped. Now I am stuck waiting for the next installment because I need to know how this ends.
If you enjoy marriage in trouble romance, emotional character growth, and slow realization love stories, you will probably love this. Just be warned you are not getting closure yet.
