Fifteen Minutes by Karen Kingsbury

Title: Fifteen Minutes
Author: Karen Kingsbury
Read by: Kirby Heyborne

Publisher: Simon & Shuster Audio

Length: 10 CDs, approximately 11.5 hours
Source: Review Copy from Simon and Shuster Audio.  Thank-you!

Zach Dylan decides to compete on a reality singing competition show, Fifteen Minutes, for a chance to win enough money to save his family’s horse farm in Kentucky.   He wants to use his singing voice to shine for God.  His girlfriend, Reese Weatherly, is a beautiful therapeutic horse trainer that is also the love of his life.  Zach dreams of saving the farm so that he can eventually continue on the family inheritance and marry Reese.

After getting to Fifteen Minutes, Zach soon finds himself one of the top competitors and beloved by fans.  He also finds himself caught up in the production where the producers have decided to script a romance between him and another contestant, Zoë.  He is also told to lay off the God talk.  Zach finds himself entranced by fame, but what will the fame cost him?  Zach also had two judges on his side, Chandra Olson and Kelly who have seen the price that fame has had on their own lives.

Overall, I enjoyed this audiobook.  The story was very interesting and definitely kept me intrigued while on the road.  I could see the point that Kingsbury was making about fame changing people and not always for the better, but I thought she failed in not showing that there is also a positive side to fame.  I’m sure as a well-known Christian romance novelist, she couldn’t argue that sometimes fame can allow you do things in life that you wouldn’t be able to otherwise.  I’ll also admit to being annoyed at two other items.  One, I was really annoyed that Zach wanted to use his voice to glorify God  and kept saying that is really wanted to be on the show.  Truthfully that is not why anyone goes on any such show.  You are doing it to glorify yourself and make money, which I think was one of the points that Kingsbury was trying to make.   I get annoyed at all famous people who seem to think God is worried about who is going to win a basketball game or a singing reality show.  I think he has much more to be concerned about.  I was also annoyed by Kelly’s story.  She was portrayed as the bad person in her marriage, when her husband PAID someone to pretend to be his girlfriend for the tabloids and that is what started their problems.  I think they both had issues in their marriage and it wasn’t one party’s fault.

As you can see, the audiobook did elicit passionate results from me, mostly because I enjoyed the characters, and the story.  I thought Kirby Heyborne was a great narrator for the audiobook as well.  I really enjoyed listening to him, although I do wish he could have sung Zach’s songs.