Tallulah

Like a season of Buffy

Revisado: 08-21-23

Loved everything about it. Even better than Book 1. Leaving more words because Amazon is forcing me to.

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This narrator takes the cake

Revisado: 04-02-21

The narrator really made this book come alive. I absolutely adored her performance and it made me love the book even more. I don't know if I would have enjoyed the book as much as I did if it hadn't been for her.

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Not the ideal pandemic read...

Revisado: 09-12-20

The epistolary-type format of this book is very interesting and different, but I thought it might make it difficult to read the book, so I picked up the audiobook and I'm glad I did. The performance 100% made this.

The first half of the story I found incredibly slow, with all the good pieces of writing (unattributed) quotes from other pieces of literature. I was about to give up when the action started. Some of the action hit a bit close to home because airborne virus anyone? And it was incredibly gory and intense. Not my kind of book right now, especially when they had the "wear your face masks and wash your hands" announcement. *shiver*. But I had to know what happened.

I found the last quarter of the book the most enjoyable, even though there was a lot of death. It was intense and unpredictable and the performances greatly enhanced it.

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He almost nailed the landing this time

Revisado: 04-26-20

I can't fault the quality of Stephen King's atmospheric writing and the characters were great. Two things about this one particularly annoyed me. Firstly, he spoils every part. He literally says "this is the thing that's going to happen" and then spends a good few chapters showing exactly that, so when the event itself happens it's not as impactful. The pet phrase is "that was the last time I saw that person again". Secondly, a certain unnecessary aspect of the end irritated me so much (because it was unnecessary and emotionally manipulative) that it almost bumped the whole book down a star just with one sentence.

What saved that star was the lovely construction as things hinted at in the start come together and make sense near the end. It's one of my favourite types of construction to read (Raven Cycle and Ninth House share it).

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Liked the story but struggled with how it was told

Revisado: 04-15-20

As a South African, I've always been amused by how Americans find British accents weird. (You both sound equally weird to me). If this is how Americans hear Brits though then I can totally understand. The narrator's voice is good and I guess they hired him because he did Percy Jackson but my god what is that coming out of his mouth when he does female British voices?? It's not an accent. It's at least five accents woven around long pauses and strangely pitched noises. Impossible to take the story seriously whenever there's dialogue. Sorry dude, I'm sure you're very good at male American characters.

The story itself reminds me of older children's books like the Famous Five, or Nancy Drew. The slow start, the unfolding mystery... but also the out of fashion storytelling devices like "filtering" the point of view with "he thought, he heard,", people constantly "beginning" to do things or "suddenly" doing things rather than just doing things and leaning heavily on adverbs. I usually don't find these things too annoying, but towards the end they were so thick that I really struggled to make it through the action scenes as the writing made them plod.

The concept is quite cool and I will definitely try out the other books in the series, especially since I see they have another narrator and are currently streaming free.

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Game of Thrones meets the Odyssey

Revisado: 04-11-20

The writing is solid and well-researched. I liked the female main character. The male was a bit too perfect and good at everything, but at least a reason is given later in the book. I think fans of sword and sorcery type fantasy will enjoy this saga, even if some of the ideas are a bit staid. The narration is very good.

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Has potential

Revisado: 04-09-20

I loved the concept and the world has potential. The prose is beautiful, but the romance fell flat for me and sometimes the characters did too because I felt like I was being told about them rather than experiencing them as the main character was. I'm usually easy on cliches because I understand how tropes are important and some cliches are popular for a reason, but some of the dialogue made me groan ("We are alike, you and I" speech used unironically for instance). As a romantic, I never thought I'd say this, but I wish the romance had been left out. All the feelings developed far from where I could see or experience them. It would have been more interesting if the characters had just not been romantically involved at all and developed the respect for each other as colleagues.

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Howl's Moving Castle meets Paprika with origami

Revisado: 04-09-20

I loved this tale and listened to it in a single sitting. The writing is similar to Diana Wynne Jones, but the story is more modern and pitched at an older audience which makes it perfect for the grown up Wynne Jones fan. It also reminded me of the anime film Paprika about a woman who has to go searching through dreams. I loved the originality of the paper magic system. Nothing bad to say about this experience.

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Main character is super annoying

Revisado: 01-25-20

Love the concept of a fantasy story about systemic racism, and loved the fact that the main character was embroiled in the supremacist culture and had terrible ideas to begin with, but she's just so dense and unrelateable even when she eventually gets a clue.

It took her hundreds of pages to grasp the basic concept of sympathy, hundreds more for her mind to wrap around what was really going on around her, and even then she was she so self absorbed that I rapidly lost patience with her. Even knowing what the novel was going for with her character arc, I feel like there was too much pathetic to wade through before the sympathetic arrived and it took me months of determined reading to get there.

The writing itself was average. There was loads of repetition and I got increasingly frustrated with some narrative habits.

Relieved to finally be done.

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Short but completely satisfying

Revisado: 07-29-19 El oyente recibió este título gratis

Had no choice but to stay up late to listen to the whole thing in one go. Everything I love about the genre bundled into one compact package.

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