Audio Book Review: The Boy And His Ribbon By Pepper Winters

The Boy And His Ribbon
(The Ribbon Duet #1)
By Pepper Winters

Length: 14 hours and 4 minutes
Narrators: Will M Watt & Hayden Bishop

“What do you do when you meet your soul mate? No wait…that’s too easy. What do you do when you meet your soul mate and have to spend a lifetime loving him in secret?

I’ll tell you what you do. You lie.”

REN

Ren was eight when he learned that love doesn’t exist—that the one person who was supposed to adore him only cared how much he was worth.

His mother sold him and for two years, he lived in terror.

But then…he ran.

He thought he’d run on his own. Turned out, he took something of theirs by accident and it became the one thing he never wanted and the only thing he ever needed.

DELLA

I was young when I fell in love with him, when he switched from my world to my everything.

My parents bought him for cheap labor, just like they had with many other kids, and he had the scars to prove it.

At the start, he hated me, and I could understand why.

For years he was my worst enemy, fiercest protector, and dearest friend.

But by the end…he loved me.

The only problem was, he loved me in an entirely different way to the way I loved him.

And slowly, my secret drove us apart.

Available At:

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My Review:

* Anything in red in the following review are spoilers.

I'll start off by saying how not my style the relationship between Ren and Della was. When this book was close to getting released my Goodreads timeline was filled with reviews of this stating how amazing, incredible, beautiful this story was. All I can say is that I tried seeing where most people were coming from but I still feel way too icky to agree with it. 

I found out a few chapters in that the writing style and pacing weren't for me. The writing style was too descriptive and detailed which ended up setting a very very slow pace to the story. There's too much detail in big chunks of this book where nothing happens. Things could have been summarized in a paragraph or two to cut down on the story. I only got through it because I sped up the audio book.

I can sympathize with Ren's situation and how hard and sad it was. I don't understand how Della mistakenly, at a year old at best, zipped herself up in his backpack but that's a discussion for a different day. I can also push myself enough to understand how he eventually cared for and raised her. The age difference doesn't bother me with their relationship. My problem is just the idea of falling in romantic love with your guardian/the-minor-you-raised crosses a line that I didn't know I had set in the first place. This is the second novel that features this type of relationship that I've read and I'm pretty sure it'll be the last. 

Maybe it's just me but I wished we could have gotten more of Della's point of view after she was old enough to have coherent thoughts. The essay format her chapters had were weird and only took me out of the story.

The ending/cliffhanger was strange. Della essentially self-sabotages with the intent to cause Ren harm by proxy. Which, I'll be honest, I found quite dumb and foolish (but she is still a teenager I guess?) and it works a little too well. 

The Audio Book:

Both narrations were great! I love it when audible does books in dual narration. That makes it so I can stand a male narrator with too deep of a voice that can't do a believable female voice reading to me because there's an actual woman reading lines meant for a female voice.

My Rating: