It took me almost one full month to listen to the Audible version of “Whiskey and Charlie.” I really enjoyed this book for a multitude of reasons and I’ll try my best to express them in this review!
I used my monthly Audible credit on this book and did not receive it in exchange for a review, or anything like that. This is the first book I’ve read from Annabel Smith, and I was surprised to find other reviews on Amazon saying that this book was boring or just not interesting enough. Maybe the audio version made things more interesting for me because the narrator was absolutely fantastic.
Book Description (From Amazon):
“A sharp, perceptive novel about family and forgiveness, Whiskey & Charlie will stay with me for a very long time.” Christina Baker Kline, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Orphan Train
With the poignancy of Tell the Wolves I’m Home and the fraught tension of The Burgess Boys, Whiskey and Charlie is a captivating novel of brothers who have drifted apart—and the accident that will determine their future. Told as a seesaw of hope and fear, this novel explores the dark truths about what family really means to us.
Whiskey and Charlie might have come from the same family, but they’d tell you two completely different stories about growing up. Whiskey is everything Charlie is not — bold, daring, carefree — and Charlie blames his twin brother for always stealing the limelight, always getting everything, always pushing Charlie back. By the time the twins reach adulthood, they are barely even speaking to each other.
When they were just boys, the secret language they whispered back and forth over their crackly walkie-talkies connected them, in a way. The two-way alphabet (alpha, bravo, charlie, delta) became their code, their lifeline. But as the brothers grew up, they grew apart.
When Charlie hears that Whiskey has been in a terrible accident and has slipped into a coma, Charlie can’t make sense of it. Who is he without Whiskey? As days and weeks slip by and the chances of Whiskey recovering grow ever more slim, Charlie is forced to consider that he may never get to say all the things he wants to say. A compelling and unforgettable novel about rivalry and redemption, Whiskey & Charlie is perfect for anyone whose family has ever been less than picture-perfect.
“A finely crafted novel that keeps us reading because we care about the characters. It’s a terrific book.”—Graeme Simsion, New York Times bestselling author of The Rosie Project and The Rosie Effect
The Narration
This book has many characters from different backgrounds and takes place across multiple countries. So, the narrator reads in a British accent, Australian, Spanish, Canadian and more. I had never heard anything narrated by Gildart Jackson before, but he did a really great job of reading in voices that were distinguishable from each other. I did not ever feel like I was “lost” while listening to the story.
The book follows the main character, Charlie, back and forth through time as he works out his relationship with his identical twin brother, Whiskey. Gildart Jackson was impressive, being able to seamlessly read as a “young Charlie” without sounding cartoonish. He read feminine voices without sounding like your Dad attempting to read you a childhood story with the typical “high pitch” voice.
I am fairly new to audiobooks, but the narration was very well done. I will definitely be looking for more audiobooks narrated by Gildart Jackson.
I will also add that one afternoon when I was listening to Whiskey and Charlie in the car, on my way to the grocery store with my husband, he suddenly turned to me and burst out laughing.
“Is this audiobook narrated by Michael Whitehall?” he asked me. In my husband’s opinion, the voice used for Charlie sounded very much like the voice that Michael Whitehall might use to imitate Jack Whitehall and that did make for a more hilarious listen. If you aren’t familiar with the two of them, I would also recommend “Jack Whitehall: Travels with My Father” on Netflix.
Overall Impressions
Whiskey and Charlie is a novel that really focuses in on characters and the question of “why do people do the things that they do?”
I found this book to be absolutely fascinating. I really fell in love with the characters and their flaws, frustrations, and successes. Charlie, the main character, is a somewhat selfish and frustrating man. He has struggled in relationships, particularly with women, his twin brother Whiskey, and in jobs. Charlie has everything mostly together, enough that he doesn’t see any reason to make any dramatic life changes. He has a steady job as a teaching assistant, though he doesn’t love it, and a beautiful girlfriend, though he doesn’t want to marry her.
I’ll squeeze in a note here that I love the character of Charlie’s girlfriend, Juliet, though I will say that she is eternally patient. She’s a thin model, beautiful, wants to settle down, and Charlie, for reasons that we don’t understand until the end of the novel, refuses to propose.
Charlie’s relationships in this book are very realistic. I don’t want to give anything away, but I found the many stressful arguments between Charlie and the other characters to be strikingly real and I felt like I really believed in the characters and their motivations.
Charlie’s complacent life gets turned upside down when his twin brother is in a tragic accident that puts him in a coma. Charlie brings us back in time, through the ever-shifting backdrop of the brothers’ relationship, and then interjects us right back into the present day, where his family is struggling to cope with the reality that Whiskey may never wake up.
Those scenes, where we follow Charlie through awkward adolescence, is really where the book started to take on a shape for me. I really loved all of the little details. I felt like I was there when their parents were fighting or when they moved to Australia. By the way, the mother has some of the best quips in the novel. I really loved her lines.
The author did a fantastic job by bringing us along with Charlie so that we could see firsthand why things end up the way that they do in present day. She really made us feel for Charlie and the characters. We even begin to dislike Whiskey a little bit, in the same way that Charlie does, because everything seems so easy for him and he can be a bully.
One of my favorite characters in the book is Charlie’s best friend, Marco, who he meets in Australia. Marco is gay, and we learn that Whiskey was not exactly subtle about that. He doesn’t outright abuse him, but he certainly is an asshole about it. Marco is such an interesting character that I felt like he could have had his own novel. A lot of that “personality” comes from how Gildart reads the character, because he has arguably one of the best voices in the book.
The other character that really made the story for me was Rosa, and I think other reviewers agreed with me. She’s fantastic and some of her lines actually made me laugh out loud.
I would definitely recommend reading this novel if you like books that follow the character more than the plot. Near the end of the book, I wasn’t sure whether Whiskey would wake up from his coma or not, but I also didn’t feel like it was really the “point.” The point was more how all the people in his life reacted differently, and how they would either let the experience pull them together or tear them apart.
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