Watery M

Great book, great performance

Revisado: 01-11-20

The story is excellent, absolutely reaching the high bar Atkinson has set for her Jackson Brodie novels. You haven't gotten 3 into this series without knowing what to expect, so rest assured that she continues in the same fashion and pulls off another great web of interconnected stories that all come together in the end with rich, detailed characters, some new and some pulled forward from the previous books. You won't be disappointed.

That said, I went into this audiobook with some trepidation because of a review I read here on Audible blasting the narrator for a bad performance of the Scottish accents. I'm an American but I have spent years working for a company out of the UK and have worked with numerous Scots, Irish and British. My ears have gotten quite accustomed to their accents. Ellen Archer does a fine job. Put that review out of your mind. Is she giving you the best, most realistic accents you've ever heard? No. But that's fine. She does what she needs to do. The various Scots in this story sound like Scots and are distinguishable from one another. (Do you know how difficult that is? To create a cast of characters' worth of different voices while you're reading?) The Irish sound Irish. The Brits sound British. At no point did I feel pulled away from the story because of the narration. On the contrary, I quickly forgot about that bad review and just enjoyed it. Maybe if I was Scottish myself I might get stuck on some of her pronunciations or exaggerations of the accent. I, myself, cringe at times when I hear British voices mangle the American accent when a stray Yank appears in an otherwise British novel (why do they always sound like drunk Texans when that happens?) but I can appreciate the effort and the skill required to pull off so many different voices and move on. It's definitely not a skill I have, and kudos to anybody who can pull that off.

tl;dr The narration is fine. Maybe I would have normally given her 4/5 stars for the performance, but I feel compelled to give her a little extra to counter that other, negative review.

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Skip it (or at least proceed with caution)

Revisado: 05-28-18

I've been listening to the Foundation books starting with Foundation through Earth—notice I haven't gotten to the prequels, yet—and this is the weakest of them so far. Worth reading just to see where he wanted to end up, but it's frankly a weaker book than the others. Which can be forgiven. Asimov was getting old when he wrote this and had already suffered the heart attack and contracted the illness which ultimate led to his death. I'll forgive a guy facing a terminal illness if he wants to take his story off the rails a bit in the 11th hour.

However, the narration here can not be forgiven. The guy who narrated Foundation through Edge was fantastic. Then someone decided to replace him with Larry McKeever on this last book, and Larry (sorry to say) was just terrible. I mean, really awful. I could have run this book through Siri's text-to-voice narration and gotten more inflection from the reading. The GPS system in my car has a more natural speaking voice. I wish I had read more reviews of this audio book before I wasted a credit on it. Had I been able to find this book in the library (like the other 4) I would have returned it in the middle of disc 1 and perhaps not even finished the book. Since, I didn't want to waste the entire credit, I listened on and subjected myself to Larry's droning enunciation for the full 18 hours. (NB: Not really. The last 2 hours I listened to it a 2x speed just to get through it.)

My advice is to skip this one, or at least proceed with caution. Read the reviews here. You've been warned.

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Thoroughly enjoyable

Revisado: 08-12-17

For fans of Jonasson's earlier work (100-Year-Old Man...) this will appear to be the inferior book, and that it is. It would have been difficult to follow-up that book with one of equal value. However, that doesn't mean this book isn't thoroughly enjoyable on its own. While not "laugh out loud" funny, it was touching in places and humorous in others, and it propelled me along as I constantly wanted to know what happens next. And, as someone else has already said here in these reviews, it has a happy ending.

Also, Peter Kenny's narration was superb. Personally I would have butchered the Swedish proper nouns had I tried reading it myself, and I thought that getting a hint of a South African accent from the South African character(s) was fantastic.

This isn't going to be the deep, heavy read of your life. But it's fun and certainly worth 12 hours of your life.

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Not impressed

Revisado: 12-18-16

I won't go into a lot of detail about the story itself, nor the writing, both of which held promise that never materialized. I suspect this writer has another, hopefully better, book in her that will come to light eventually. I wouldn't recommend this book.

The audio quality of this narration, however, I have to comment on. The narrators, themselves, were good, no complaints there, but the technical quality of the recording was marred constantly by spliced in re-recordings of small sections where the entire tone/volume/atmosphere of the recording changed, distracting me from the story each time it happened. Which was: frequently. I'm no audio technician, but it seems to me that if you have to re-recerd parts of an audio book, you do so in the same setting with the same equipment set to the same levels. These parts sounded like they were re-recorded on an iPhone and edited in much later.

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Good performance marred by technical issues

Revisado: 06-26-16

I was a big fan of The Gone-Away World and thought it was masterful, both the book and the performance by Kirby Heyborne. So I was naturally excited to read (listen to) Nick Harkaway's second novel, Angelmaker. Sadly, it wasn't nearly as good. Not to say it was bad, but it didn't blow me over like The Gone-Away World did. It was fun, at least, so I'll give the story 3 stars.

That said, Daniel Weyman's performance was excellent and I'd give the audio 5 stars if it weren't for one thing, and I don't know if this was Weyman's fault or the sound editor's. I kept noticing pauses in the narration, no more than a few seconds long, maybe every 3-5 minutes, which made me think I was hitting a section break (noticeable lines of "white space" in printed text) but these often came in the middle of paragraphs.

Initially I thought it might have been a problem with my Audible app, but it's not. I have verified this using several different tools (web streaming and downloading to iTunes). These gaps are in the recording. I found them quite off-putting. Maybe others wouldn't mind, but to me they kept triggering a "we're moving on to a new section" warning in my brain when none was intended, breaking the flow of the narration. And, I could be wrong (because I wasn't really keeping track) but they seemed to get more frequent towards the end. Quite frustrating.

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Five Hours of Ron Rifkin's Over-Active Salivary Glands

Revisado: 08-11-15

What did you like best about this story?

I thought the story was well told (targeting an adolescent audience), thought provoking, and moving. It wasn't earth-shattering, being similar to a lot of dystopian-future stories like this one, but I think Lowry included enough creative flair to make it something uniquely her own. I'm glad there are 3 other books in this quartet. I will likely read them all one day. Or listen to them, as long as they have a different narrator.

Would you be willing to try another one of Ron Rifkin’s performances?

Not likely. It took me about 45 minutes of listening to figure out what that sound was, every 3 or 4 sentences, like someone swallowing compulsively. Then I figured out it was Ron Rifkin swallowing compulsively every 3 or 4 sentences. After that, I couldn't hear much else besides that. It's like a crying child in a supermarket. Until you notice it, it's just a noise in the background, but once you hear it, you can't stop hearing it. Really, couldn't a tech savvy producer have edited out all of that extra noise from the final cut?

Any additional comments?

The musical soundtrack they played constantly through the narration was almost more jarring than Rifkin's constant swallowing. I don't need music to tell me "this is an important part of the story" because I'm listening to the story, have an adult brain, and can figure that out for myself, thank you. Double whammy against whatever producer decided to include the music AND Rifkin's mouth noises. (Unless the intent was to use loud music to cover the noisiest and grossest of Rifkin's sloshing, in which case, I retract the above and say, Kudos!)

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Great book, well read

Revisado: 04-02-15

What did you love best about All the Light We Cannot See?

Fascinating viewpoints to a familiar story. The writing was mostly excellent. Well paced. Engrossing. I kept looking for excuses to get back to it, which is a sign of a really good book in my opinion.

Any additional comments?

Good narration. While he didn't try to "do voices" for different characters like some readers do, he did a fine job of keeping me engrossed. I think his reading was quite good.

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Ton of fun plus a GREAT performance

Revisado: 03-16-15

Would you listen to The Martian again? Why?

I probably would, and I don't say that lightly. I have waaaay more books that I want to read (or listen to) than I have time in my day(s) to read/listen to them. I generally move on to the next in my stack quickly. But this one was so much fun that I might revisit it again down the road.

What did you like best about this story?

The sarcastic humor in the voice of the main character, Mark (the guy stuck on Mars), made it for me. Without that edge, the book would have quickly slipped into a depressing montage of loneliness cliches. The parts where he talks about his hatred for disco are priceless.

Which character – as performed by R. C. Bray – was your favorite?

The part of Mark was my favorite. Bray has the perfect voice to illustrate Mark's sense of humor.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

I wish I could have. 11 hours would have been one heck of a sitting.

Any additional comments?

The only minor criticism I'll give is that Bray's voice work was stellar for both the 1st person narrative of Mark's log entries on Mars as well as the 3rd person narrative of everybody else. But as a listener, that got a little confusing. The story would switch between the two with no notification, and as I was listening I sometimes thought I was still hearing things from Mark's POV only to realize we'd moved back to 3rd person. How could that have been done differently? I'd hate to suggest a different reader for the different sections because Bray was so good. Maybe if he had used a different voice (accent, tone, intensity, dunno) for the 3rd person narration it would have stood out better. Just a thought. Beyond that minor quibble, he did a great job. Thoroughly enjoyable.

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Gripping tale, well executed

Revisado: 03-06-15

Would you consider the audio edition of Wolf Winter to be better than the print version?

I appreciated the narrator helping me pronounce some of Swedish words that I was unaccustomed to, but over all no, not better. About the same. Bresnahan did a great job reading the story and I was certainly enthralled, but I don't think she added anything to it that wasn't already on the page.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Toss up between Fredericka and the Priest, neither of whom impressed me much for the first half of the book, but both really came into their own by the end.

Any additional comments?

Great story. The pacing is slow and deliberate for the first three-quarters of the book. At times almost painfully slow. But events start snowballing (pardon the pun) into a rush of revelations at the end. Others have griped about this, but I found that perfectly in line with standard mystery plots. While this story feels more like historical fiction, it is, at its heart, a mystery to be solved.

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The narrator was fine

Revisado: 02-13-15

Would you be willing to try another book from Rob Thomas and Jennifer Graham ? Why or why not?

I'm a fan of the TV show. As long as Rob Thomas (and Jennifer Graham) continue to churn out these books, I'll likely keep reading them so I can find out what new mysteries our witty heroine tackles, how her love life shapes up (Logan, so far away; Leo, so close), and what happens with the sheriff. These are my guilty pleasures. I make no excuses.

What does Rebecca Lowman bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

OF COURSE everybody who loves the VM character and listened to the first audiobook would have preferred Kristen Bell to return for the second, but honestly we all had to know that was wishful thinking, at best. Lowman does a fine job distinguishing between different characters, and once you get used to the fact that her voice is different from KB's, she draws you into the story nicely. Honestly her only flaw was that she was not Kristen Bell, and if that's going to turn you off, then don't listen. I enjoyed her reading.

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