He Said/She Said by Erin Kelly

Title: He Said/She Said
Author: Erin Kelly
Narrators: Jonathan Broadbent and Helen Johns
Series: Stand Alone
Genre: Psychological Thriller
Publisher: Macmillan Audio (June 6, 2017 )
Source: Library Find
Rating: ☕☕☕

Synopsis: The path of every eclipse can be predicted from now until the end of time.

Kit and Laura, young and in love, pledge to travel the globe and see as many as possible together. They have no idea of the darkness that will follow.

At a festival in Cornwall, in the hushed moments after the first eclipse they share, Laura interrupts a man and a woman. She knows she saw something terrible. But the man denies it. Later, in a panic, Laura tells a little white lie - which changes four lives irreparably.

When the victim turns up on their doorstep, the truth seems to vanish ever further into shadow. As gratitude spills into dangerous obsession, Kit and Laura simply have to run.

But they can't hide forever. With another eclipse on the horizon, the past is closing in on them again.
Telling Kit the truth will cost Laura her marriage. But keeping the secret could cost them both their lives.

And the person they fear the most knows exactly where they'll be...

My Thoughts: Remember that time when I thought this book had been recommended to me by a friend on GoodReads and then I read it and borderline hated it only to realize in no way did any friend of mine on GoodReads actually say I should read this book? Yeah.....so that happened.

The Good, The Bad, The Really Bad, and Everything Else: First and foremost I couldn't get over the super slow pace of this book. Nothing happened forever. Finally something would happen and peak my interest only to revert back to the slow pacing again. I also was annoyed with the constant back and forth the narration took. It jumped back and forth in time and also jumped between points of view. It is told between Kit's and Laura's points of views and they would also bop between the year 2000 and then 2015. At one point I think there was even an earlier POV with Kit but I was too bored to really notice. I just really wanted the book to get to the point.

The last 10% or so got really twisty and I approved. However, there was yet another twist at the very end I felt did nothing to add to the story and without it the book would have been just fine. I really wish the twistiness would have happened way sooner. I literally had to check this book out from the library three times in order to get to the end because I found other things to do rather than listen to this book.

As far as the characters go, not one could be considered likable and their secrets made me even more against them than I probably should have been. At one point Kit made some comment about lying snowballs into more lies. Yet the entire book is centered around concealing lies and what it does to a person. At least the sun eclipse information was interesting.

So what else did I like about this book to make it an average rather than a stinker? Well, I can't fault the writing of Erin Kelly. It flowed well, if you haven't decided you're over the dual POV narration anyway, and I'm pretty sure listening was a way better way of reading this book than had I read it myself. Of course, this is only supposition on my part, but I know my reading patterns and instead of week after week to get to the end of this book it would have been month after month.

The narration being split between a male and a female POV lent to a dual narration for the audio very well. Helen Johns and Jonathan Broadbent did an OK job. I was able to listen to the book at my normal 1.8X's the speed without the story sounding garbled. So all in all I neither was wowed nor did I dislike the listening experience so I would pick up another audio book narrated by either/or these performers.

In a Nutshell: Since I didn't full on hate this book I'm not against reading another book by Erin Kelly. I'm hoping the slow pacing of this book is just a one off and not her typical style.