So here's the thing. I love Julia Quinn. I've listened to the Bridgerton books with Rosalyn Landor narrating and felt like I was being personally tucked into a Regency-era blanket made of witty banter and slow-burn yearning. So when I saw Splendid — Quinn's very first novel — pop up on my feed, I thought, yes. Give me baby Quinn. Give me the raw, unpolished version of the woman who would eventually write the Viscount Who Loved Me and make me weep into my morning coffee.
I was reorganizing my font library at 2 AM (because deadlines are a suggestion and insomnia is a lifestyle) when I started this one. Frida was asleep on my keyboard. Diego was staring at me from the bookshelf like he already knew what was coming. He was right to judge me.
The Story Has That Early Quinn Sparkle — Buried Under Something Else
Let me be fair to the book itself first. Splendid is a 1995 debut, and you can feel it. Emma Dunster is an American heiress in London who doesn't want to husband-hunt, and Alexander Ridgely is a duke who thinks he's too cool for love. It's enemies-to-lovers-adjacent, there's a reckless kiss, there's the whole "I will resist this woman" thing from Alex that lasts approximately five seconds before he's completely unraveled. Classic Quinn DNA is here — the sharp dialogue, the heroine who refuses to shrink, the hero who's arrogant but not cruel. You can see the seeds of what would become Bridgerton-level chemistry.
But this is Quinn learning to walk. The pacing meanders. Some of the conflict feels manufactured — there's a stretch in the middle where misunderstandings pile up in ways that feel more telenovela than Regency wit (and listen, I was raised on telenovelas, I know the difference between earned dramatic tension and "we could solve this in one conversation"). Emma's independence is stated more than shown in places. It's a 13-and-a-half-hour listen, and around hour 8, I genuinely wondered if I'd accidentally looped back to an earlier chapter. The pacing sag reminded me of what I hit around the midpoint of Chasin' Eight — that same feeling of manufactured conflict eating into what should've been crackling momentum, though that one at least had a narrator who made the tension feel earned.
Abuela would've still eaten this up, honestly. She loved a stubborn duke.
Lucy Rayner, I Wanted to Root for You
Okay. Here's where it gets rough.
I've seen people online say the narration was "terrible" and I went in thinking, come on, it can't be that bad. People exaggerate.
They were not exaggerating.
Lucy Rayner's performance has this tone — and I don't know how else to describe it — like she's reading to a group of particularly slow five-year-olds. There's a condescension baked into the delivery that sits on top of every scene like a film you can't wipe off. During what should be heated, breathless moments between Emma and Alex, I felt like I was being gently informed about their passion rather than pulled into it. And for me, that's a dealbreaker. I need to FEEL the kiss. I need the narrator's voice to drop half an octave when the tension shifts. Rayner keeps everything at this steady, pleasant, almost instructional register.
And then there's Emma's American accent. It drifts. It wanders. Sometimes Emma sounds vaguely Bostonian, sometimes she sounds like she's from nowhere in particular, and once — I swear — she sounded briefly Australian? I lost my place in the story trying to figure out what was happening with her vowels.
The regional accent work for side characters is... ambitious. I'll give her that. Some of it lands. But there's apparently a Middle-Eastern character who ends up sounding like a retired English headmaster, and yeah, that pulled me right out.
Compare this to Rosalyn Landor narrating Quinn and it's night and day. Landor makes you forget you're listening to one person. Rayner makes you very, very aware of it.
Who This Is (and Isn't) For
If you're a Julia Quinn completist who wants to trace her evolution as a writer, Splendid is interesting as an artifact. The print version is probably the way to go. If you're an audiobook-first person like me — someone who needs the narrator to be a partner in the emotional experience, not an obstacle — this one's going to frustrate you. I kept designing through it because the story had enough charm to keep me from hitting stop, but I never once got that chest-tightening, pause-and-stare-at-the-ceiling feeling. And that's what I'm here for.
This book felt like finding your favorite author's college sketchbook — endearing, rough, full of promise — but someone photocopied it badly and now you're squinting.
Read It With Your Eyes Instead
I'm giving the story itself a generous pass because it's Quinn and you can feel her future brilliance trying to break through. But the audio experience? It held me at arm's length for over 13 hours. My heart never got the chance to do its thing. Save the credit. Grab the paperback. Or pray that Rosalyn Landor gets the call to re-record, because honestly — same.
