Chastened

Trite is being generous

Revisado: 11-07-23

Solomon Vine is a grizzled veteran of every element of espionage. Just ask him. Even so, despite his decades of experience, etc, he misses the solution so poorly idem within the author’s clumsy plotting and leaden prose. It is a poor tale, filled with poorly conceived characters, poorly told.

I pity the narrator.

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Meh

Revisado: 08-14-23

Meh and mehly performed. Tedious plot and plodding narration. And six other words to fill the quota. But still just meh.

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A mess

Revisado: 07-29-20

What is StormTech? It is the only plot device Mr Szal knows, apparently. Need drama? StormTech. Character development? StormTech. A catchy adjective to finis the though? StormTech!

Mr Szal is the print equivalent of Uwe Boll.

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Almost. But not quite.

Revisado: 08-25-19

If only Mr Hutchinson we’re as clever as his mother supposed, then the novel’s premise might have matched its execution. Alas...reality intervened. This was a trite, wandering, morass of a novel executed semi-competently. An editor and some actual revision might have saved it.

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Meh

Revisado: 05-30-19

A novel of odd choices narrated by a man who makes equally odd choices. It’s a pastiche of historical episodes painted nazi and told half by Brits and half by pirates. Both author and narrator have done better. Much.

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Why?

Revisado: 04-22-19

I can only guess it was written to propitiate the porcelain god. There seems no other point.

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Awful narration spoils the tale

Revisado: 12-08-18

I could never decide whether the accents the narrator adopted were an homage to ‘Talk Like A Pirate’ Day a drunken Goofy. Whatever his intent, it ruined the story. Avoid this 1632 audible offering is my recommendation, and read it yourself instead.

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Awful.

Revisado: 08-31-18

This book suffered from two problems: it was poorly written and poorly read. The story was probably 30% interior monologue, half of which is questionably useful exposition, the other half of which is implausible and overwritten internal narrative. The rest of the story is essentially a badly written spy novel with all of the normal faults thereof (ridiculous feats, bad dialogue, extraneous detail-Mr Stirling did lots of research and included every last thing he found in the story, narrative coherence or pace be damned-and an outsized hero. That the outsized hero was a bisexual woman of immigrant parents didn’t rescue anything. It just made the fact it was a badly written, bad story all the more obvious. Fortunately, the narrator was able to further illuminate that as well. Featuring wandering accents for the main characters (a California born hero who’s Cuban mother somehow so affected her daughter’s English that she, in a single conversation, can speak with an Italian, Mexican, Canadian, and mid-Atlantic accent) and a comic voice for the 20-year old Boston Irish love interest-think A constipated Mr Magoo and you’re. It far wrong-he really brought the story to life. As much as I wanted to like this story, I just could not. It was awful.

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A good Winslow but not a great one

Revisado: 02-02-18

Not his best but still a master at work. The narrator was good but too much: Winslow’s prose is spare, his descriptions terse, tense and focused. The narrator’s breathy whisper was too much;’not bad
as much as just unnecessary. A bit less might have improved the whole thing but it was still a good car ride.

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Awful narration ruins fine tale

Revisado: 08-20-17

What would have made Divorcing Jack better?

The narrator's fine turn as Willy Loman in High Prairie, Alberta does not, unfortunately, equate with the ability to bring to life Colin Bateman's Dan Starkey or his Belfast milieu. Rather than give life to Bateman's writing, Mr Murrant's milquetoast performance eventually just gives listeners a headache. Skip and get the version with Adam Moore.

Would you recommend Divorcing Jack to your friends? Why or why not?

Nope. Because I like my friends.

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Glen Murrant?

Adam Moore.

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from Divorcing Jack?

The ones where Glen Murrant read the text.

Any additional comments?

I'm sure he's a nice man...he sounds like a nice man...but he's not a very good narrator.

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