Ambagious

Regarding both volumes 1 and 2: eh.

Revisado: 05-30-21

Short version: I liked Agatha H. and the Airship City pretty well and bought the sequel, because the first doesn't hold up as a stand-alone novel. I was so disappointed in the second (Agatha H. and the Clockwork Princess) that I'm returning both.

If I were just rating this volume, it would have been 4 stars overall, 5 stars for performance, and 3 stars for story.

Details and explanations:

Okay, so. For this book (Agatha H. and the Airship City)--

Story/Plot: It's fun, funny, and fast-paced. A great work it's not, but not everything needs to be. Some predictable bits, some annoying bits, an irritating emphasis on getting Agatha into mortifying states of undress, but overall, fine.

World-building: Evocative and silly. It fits absolutely perfectly for a graphic novel, not so much for a novel that's all words, works fine if you're picturing graphics while you listen.

Writing quality: ...adequate. Far from stellar, but not so bad that I had to stop listening.

Characterization: Simple but entertaining. Some very nice - and surprisingly subtle - touches with the Jägers.

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Angela Dawe's performance: Really awesome. Her skills are the reason I bought the second book. She has a great range of voices and some very good accents. Her sentences don't all sound the same. She pulls off even the mediocre bits of the writing smoothly. Listening to this made me hunt through the (really long) list of other things she's narrated, just to hear more. If I was reviewing only the first book, performance would absolutely be 5-star.
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And then there's the second book (Agatha H. and the Clockwork Princess)--

Story/Plot: It's fine. It's pretty linear, no complexity or neat touches. It's exactly what would work for a serial graphic, doesn't really have the kind of...shape...that makes a text novel excellent.

World-building: The rate of world-building slows down, but that's appropriate for a second volume, where a lot has already been established. It's still a fun world, there's definitely new stuff, and it holds together pretty well. The problem is--

Writing quality: It plods, especially in the world-building. There are a lot of info-dumps that are tedious, and overall, most of the first 2/3 or 3/4 happens too slowly, with too many words. 'Too many words' is not something I say often - I was excited to get it because I really like long books and it's over 18 hours. I thought that meant a whole lot more story. It turns out it mean some more story, but mainly means a lot more words. I haven't read the graphic novel of this, but the feeling it has to me is that the Folios started getting into this idea of writing a text novel and they really should have stuck closer to the graphic.

Characterization: Quite good. There are some bits near the end where my head was in a whirl because a few main characters were saying completely different things depending on who they were talking to - and it's all perfectly congruent with the characters. It's a large cast, so to speak, and it keeps you on your toes, but the characters remain distinct and, mostly, interesting.

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Angela Dawe's performance: Disappointing, especially after the first book. Her sentences start sounding more the same, especially on the descriptions and explanations. It gets better in bits which are more action and character-based, especially dialogue, but I can't help wondering if she just got bored. It's only at the climax that her skills really show up again. It's great to have them there, but it can't redeem hours of being...fine. Okay. Not bad. I was looking for a lot more than just 'not bad'.
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So, since I don't have any reason to believe that the writing is going to get better in the 3rd and 4th books, and since the evidence seems to suggest that if the writing isn't dynamic enough, Dawe's performance isn't enough to redeem it, and since the individual volumes don't stand alone well enough for me to want to keep them without going on to listen to the rest, I'm returning the first two.

Maybe someday I'll just read the graphic novels. I suspect the original format is the best.

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Great book, perfect reader

Revisado: 04-28-17

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms manages to be both complexly woven and a great ride. The characters are individual, complicated, and compelling, the world-building and cosmology are fabulous. It's also just well-written. I enjoyed reading it the first time, and it rewards rereading in a very satisfying way. Sensual in all meanings of the word, literate, capable, *fun*. I love this book.

And Casaundra Freeman is a superb reader. Not only is she *exactly* the right voice for this book, she's just plain great. She never fumbles a line, never garbles a sentence by getting the emphasis wrong, never forgets whose voice she's using. Some of the text is challenging for a reader, involving two-voiced internal conversations without the speakers identified and both of them simultaneously the same person and not the same person. If that doesn't make sense, don't worry about it - the point is that it's a tricky bit of narration, and Freeman carries it off beautifully. I can't wait to find more books she's read and listen to them all.

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modern day meets fantasy meets Arthurian retelling

Revisado: 03-31-17

Kingfisher - the title itself a delicate play on words - is set in a world with both cell phones and sorceresses, knights, guns, goddesses, wyverns, Friday Night Fish Fries, and small, tinny, fuel-efficient cars - and even a hint of Faerie. The prose is brisker and doesn't have the crystalline beauty of McKillip's other fantasies, but is still mesmerizing. The story is complex, moving back and forth among three (at least three) sets of characters (although the sets shift occasionally) until they converge for the denouement. Running through all the well-turned phrases is water imagery which is totally appropriate to a story focused on rivers and coastal fishing communities, and which help draw the disparate elements of the story together.

Bernadette Dunne is fun, as a reader. She is at the high end of competence among even good readers, virtually never mispronouncing a word or mis-anticipating where a sentence is going. She is also infinitely better than some other readers McKillip's work has reaped, whose breathy girlish wonder destroys the actual wonder of the writing. Dunne still has moments where she can't quite relax and let the prose do all the heavy lifting - which is the only way to be entirely successful at reading such a well-crafted book - moments where she forces the wonder and amazement with her tone instead of letting the story carry it. But she's so much better than readers like Gabrielle de Cuir (who might be excellent reading something entirely different from McKillip, but I'll probably never know) that there is no real comparison.

I finished listening to the book with the simultaneous gentle regret and deep satisfaction that is the hallmark of a good story and a good performance.

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A hint of history in a genuinely new world

Revisado: 02-09-17

Carol Berg's earlier work is highly enjoyable pulp, emotionally gratifying and eminently fun to read. The Spirit Lens is also emotionally satisfying and fun to read, but it is deeper and richer. The world-building is especially enjoyable, reminiscent of France poised on the cusp of the Enlightenment (where magic plays the role of faith) but with varied original cosmologies and histories having brought it to that point. The narrator is not only likable, he contains all the struggles and contradictions, beliefs, hopes, and frustrations of a truly believable character - and the explicit plot line, of unraveling a mysterious tangle of sorcerous crimes, is paralleled by an inner plot line that is also one of truth-seeking, this time of a fairly conventional and unhappy young man forced to understand his own history and change many of his most profound beliefs about his world and himself before he can succeed in his task.

The short version of that is, this book is not just fun, it's satisfying in a more literary, well-crafted way than some of Berg's early work. For someone like me who notices that consciously, it means the story can be enjoyed on multiple levels simultaneously. For someone who doesn't notice these things consciously, it still shapes a much more solid, powerful book. It's always nice to find a writer who just keeps getting better and better (especially when there are so many others who use up all their skills and good ideas in the first book and then devolve). Berg is, almost startlingly, aging well.

I will note, the ending is an odd one, in terms of resolution. While not a cliff-hanger in the traditional sense, the story ends just as the world takes a sudden sharp turn into a much darker and stranger reality.

David Devries is a very entertaining reader and handles the narrator's voice very well. Some of his voices for other characters are a little jarring at first, but they do work. From time to time - not often, but often enough that I found it noticeable - he obscures or inverts the meaning of a sentence by putting the emphasis on entirely the wrong word, suggesting to me that he may have done the reading without quite as much preparation as would have been best. It doesn't make the reading bad and I think that many people who 'surf' a little might not even notice, but it is a touch distracting to a listener who is following along very attentively. I'd still happily buy another book with his reading.

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Some of this century's best SF writing. Pity.

Revisado: 02-04-17

Laurie J. Marks's Elemental Logic books are, in my opinion, some of the best fantasy-genre writing published in the 21st century. The world-building is complex and subtle, handled with a deft maturity of writing skill. The characters are detailed, engaging, and highly individual. The dialogue is good. The plots are, if anything, better. The prose is excellent but not flashy, leaving the story to shine out clearly from each page.

As the first book in the series, Fire Logic has the highest burden on it, to establish both the changing world and the main cast of characters while still telling a gripping story. It succeeds.

Also, these books are *fun*.

I have tried, in listening to Anita Roy Dobbs, to come up with some alternate book or genre I think she might be better suited to, but I'm coming up dry. I don't mind a slow, distinct speaker, but the pace of her reading is so dragged out, it sounds like the recording is being played at the wrong speed altogether, most of all in the dialogue, where it does the most damage. She has a breathy sweetness of tone which has absolutely nothing to do with the harshly beautiful stories being played out. Finally it seems to me that she doesn't have the basic skill of separating characters by different tones of voice, tempos of speech, and subtle shifts in accent and manner, so she uses much more heavy-handed methods to keep speakers sounding different from each other, with the result that all of them sound blurred and numb, like people worn to stupidity from 30 hours in a blizzard fumbling their way into their lines, or like people trying to converse after taking much too much valium and not yet gone to bed.

I am getting through Fire Logic's recording with clenched teeth, solely on the basis of my love for the book. Much as I hate to leave a series broken off early, I think it's unlikely I'll buy Earth Logic or Water Logic, until some distant, hoped-for day when someone else records them and I can try again.

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This is Faerie, and the humans who live with it.

Revisado: 02-03-17

Of all the contemporary SF writers who tackle Faerie, Holly Black seems to me to be the one who *gets* it. Her Faerie is beautiful and frightening, dark and wild, its inhabitants neither good nor evil but amoral, alien, dangerous, and mesmerizing. No other writer I know of has managed to evoke the appalling draw of glamour, the irresistible undertow-strong pull of a desire that is impossible to fight - even when everything sane inside a person screams that it is stupid and fatal and unwanted - because it's impossible to get the brain and body to line up and even try to fight at all. She is all the more extraordinary for having found ways to blend the Faerie of ballads and fables with the largely unconnected old and dark versions of fairy-tales, to weave a world which is all the more alien because it is so well known.

The Darkest Part of the Forest is all of that and more, because Black layers this incredibly rich and vivid Faerie with an equally evocative - though more sparing - depiction of life in a very strange and yet very recognizable small town largely dependent on its tourists, and again with a truly complex and troubling depiction of an unusual family and two siblings' childhoods in it, alternately glorious (or perhaps the word should be *glamorous*) and damagingly neglectful. (And, in a world filled with formulaic romances, predictable from page 3, let us stop for a moment to consider with respect a story in which - although there is indeed romance - the central, pivotal, close, flawed but unbelievably powerful relationship is between brother and sister.)

That layering, where every part reflects back on every other, and where the individual characters are just as vividly filled out as the world they inhabit and the dialogue is almost startlingly believable, combine with a truly gripping, fast-paced, complex but never overly complicated plot to make this a book I am going to read - or listen to - over and over again.

Lauren Fortgang's reading, while not quite up to the full scope of the novel, is still more than good enough to allow the novel to shine through, and provide a companion aspect to it. At times her intonation has overtones of Kate Reading, and at times Anne Hathaway in the Princess Diaries, and often is very much her own. A good reading is one which not only doesn't get in the way of the text but adds a dimension to it, and Fortgang achieves this mark with room to spare.

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Can we try that again? Please?

Revisado: 04-08-13

Curse of Chalion is one of my favorite Bujolds - honestly, it's one of my favorite books. After years and years of doing good work on the Vorkosigan novels, she turned her hand to a wholly new piece of fantasy, producing compelling characters, with the simultaneously hilarious and penetrating dialogue of all her best writing, in an incredibly rich, detailed, interesting world, fully supplied with totally new gods and beliefs, a history of politics, hardship, courtly elegance, and war, a society, a geography... Curse of Chalion is a masterful piece of epic fantasy which keeps the story fully anchored in the gripping humanity of its characters.

And someone went and gave it to Lloyd James to read. There may be some books he could read well, I don't know. In Curse of Chalion, he seems to struggle simply to complete each sentence, intonation going up at random, and eventually wandering back down again, without any grasp of what the words that have just come out of his mouth might possibly mean. And I suspect that in fact he may not know what several of the words mean (and I don't mean ones Bujold invented, just English), because he mangles the pronunciation of several of them.

Harsh, harsh. I feel like I should apologize. But I love this book, and Lloyd James made listening to it once an agony, and listening to it more than once unthinkable.

If you want to see Bujold really stretching her wings and putting all her wit and intelligence and eloquence to great use....read the book on paper (and then get Kate Reading's reading of the semi-sequel Paladin of Souls, where the book and the performer are equally superb). Read it on paper, and then hope and pray that at some point, there will be another audio recording of it, with a reader who actually understands the prose and the story, and can do justice to both.

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A pleasant read, performed by a great reader

Revisado: 09-28-09

House of Many Ways is in some ways a new direction for Diana Wynne Jones, and in many ways reminiscent of her other lighter, funnier works. It's entertaining and has some good bits of character insight/development, and some nice moments of tension, and it is pretty much free from the underlying hatred of adult women which tarnishes so many of Jones's otherwise more engaging works.

What makes this recording a joy to own and hear, however, is Jenny Sterlin's sterling performance. After years of Gerard Doyle's agonizing struggles to get meaningfully from one end of a sentence to another, it is a dazzling relief to finally have a reader who is brilliantly suited to Diana Wynne Jones's works, with range, flexibility, intelligence, and humor.

Here's fervently hoping that others of DWJ's best novels will be given the reader they deserve.

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Great to have a McKillip, but not with this reader

Revisado: 05-26-09

Not the very best of McKillip's work but still with the odd, unexpected, quiet charm which distinguishes her prose, her characters, and her imagery from any other writer's, _Od Magic_ is a fine place for a publisher to start with recordings. The world is complex, the characters varied, the story not so intricate as to leave a listener stranded but a long way from simple.

But the reader. Gabrielle de Cuir has a sweet, breathless, girlish voice which embroiders on every hint of wonder until it loses all its interest. She doesn't have the range for the variety of characters she's posed, but more, she seems to take the delicacy and beauty of McKillip's prose as a mandate to make a sticky-sweet spun-sugar confection out of a story that truly has more grip to it than that. de Cuir should be set to reading cyberpunk or other dystopias, where the *italic* quality of her reading would provide a contrast, a surprise, a source of richness in the reading. To have her reading McKillip is to reinforce every stereotype there is of McKillip's flowery-ness, every stereotype formed by readers who don't pay attention to the real tensions and ambiguities laced - yes, delicately, but with great tensile strength - through the narratives. De Cuir reads _Od Magic_ exactly the way someone who didn't like the book would expect it to be read.

I've been a fierce fan of Patricia McKillip's works since 1981. When _Od Magic_ was published, I bought it and read it and liked it very much. Every month or so, I do a hitherto useless search for any of her books available through Audible. When I found one, I bought it. I downloaded it. I started it. I never finished. Now, when I do my searche for anything by McKillip, it's with both eagerness and dread: what if there is another one, one I like even more? But--what if it's read by de Cuir?

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Weird and wonderful

Revisado: 03-30-09

This satirical, hysterical romp of a novel is a classic now, and would be hard to describe in any case. At breakneck pace, it careens through the galaxy, only rarely pausing long enough for the characters - or the listeners - to catch their breath.

Arguably, the best way to listen to Hitchhiker's Guide is to listen to the original radio show that prompted the novel in the first place.

But if you're going to get an audiobook instead of the radio-show, this is the one. Stephen Fry is top-notch, and clearly having just the right amount of fun.

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