Mairead O'Sullivan Leong

Boston is now part of Minnesota: Story at 11.

Revisado: 07-10-17

What made the experience of listening to The Sword of Summer the most enjoyable?

Uh, I gave the reading an ill-deserved two stars. It *wasn't* enjoyable, and I stopped listening two hours in. The narrator's thoroughly incongruous, Minnesotan accent made it really hard to concentrate on the scrappy, Bostonian protagonist. Every time "Magnus" scampered around Harvard Yard (pronounced just like that), merrily elongating every "o" for a month and a half and failing to park an "r" on the end of a word ending in "a", the magic of narrative wore thinner and thinner. Maybe the producers have never met a Bostonian. But maybe they should have done some basic work to get someone who sounded authentic.

While this may sound like a flimsy reason to scrap an audiobook, look at other children's books: there's a reason Texans generally don't narrate Roald Dahl and Australians don't often get a shot at "Make Way for Ducklings." The accent of the narrator is part of the world building, and this audiobook botches it spectacularly.

What did you like best about this story?

As usual, the integration of myth and modernity is fun. It is exciting to see Riordan branching out from Greek and Egyptian mythology into other arenas.

How did the narrator detract from the book?

First person narration needs to bear some minor resemblance to the character's voice. Maybe Chapter 55 explains that Magnus is secretly living in Boston, Minnesota instead of Massachusetts; I couldn't stand it longer than two hours or so.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

Based on the narration in the audiobook? "Casting by random lottery"

Any additional comments?

While it was an enjoyable story, massive eyeroll at the "dead mom, no family, wah wah" plot line. Okay, Harry Potter, we get it.

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Great plot but irritating writing gaffes

Revisado: 07-17-15

What did you like best about The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack? What did you like least?

Full disclosure: I am an English teacher, so the writing errors may not bother others as much. I also just bought the second book in the hopes that the plot magic will continue and the writing magic will grow.

The good: the plot took quite a while to get off the ground (about half of the book, actually), but when it got going, it was quite good! I liked the explanation for steampunk Victoriana as an error created through time travel, and I enjoyed watching inexplicable events from earlier chapters explain themselves.

The bad:
1. Death by Exposition: in normal conversation, people speak in short bursts. It's rare for one person to speak for long. In this novel, people lecture for ten or more minutes at a stretch in order to give "background" that the person listening would already know if it's so common knowledge. This is apparently what passes for normal conversation.

2. Department of Redundancy and Repetition: hey, did you read the description of the book yet? Then you'll know that Burton is both a "famous explorer" and a "king's agent." Learn to love those phrases, my friend. You will hear them in almost every paragraph. It gets old after the third time.

3. Toxic Description: This is what drove me up the wall. I searched for Mark Hodder's Wikipedia page just to make sure he wasn't actually in 8th grade before I tackled this section. Typically, grade and middle school students have a lot of trouble sorting out necessary and helpful details from unnecessary and tangential fluff. They get it eventually, so why is a published, adult author still confused about necessary versus unnecessary details?!

For example: there is a scene where Burton is trying to go to bed and take a nap. It has nothing to do with the plot and merely serves as a bridge between scenes. The scene takes him from the door of his house to his bed. "He staggered up the stairs and collapsed into bed" would do it nicely. Instead, we get lavish descriptions of the architecture of the house, digressions on what Burton plans to do with the spare bedroom in the future, a lovingly detailed discussion of the maid's schedule for the whole day, babbling about Burton's decorating decisions in his study and bedroom, and other trivia. It is useful to know about Burton's rapiers by the fire in a later scene. None of the rest of it ever comes up again.

THE WHOLE BOOK IS LIKE THIS. You will be treated to descriptions of random passers-by, itemized lists of everything worn by random characters (important or not), engineering treatises, and geographical ramblings when there's a plot to get to. I mentioned that it takes well over six and a half hours for the book to really start -- THIS IS WHY.

4. Unbelievable Talent: If Nancy Drew (who developed a new super-talent in every book) and James Bond (catnip to women) had a kid, that kid would be Burton. The talents just became laughable by the end because they were so ludicrously overplayed and poorly introduced. Rather than implying things and letting the reader figure them out ("Oh, gosh, he's speaking Swahili! And Bangalore! And French! And Linear A! And Klingon! He must be good with languages!"), the author brings whatever action to a screeching halt, identifies the talent specifically, and rambles about it for a while.

The talents are also hilariously improbable. Burton is a mastery of absolutely everything under the sun. I started out just rolling my eyes. By the end of the book, I was so amused that I'd pull out my headphones and share the news with my husband whenever new talents popped up like mushrooms after the rain.

"He's a master linguist who speaks 24 languages! Of course he is. He's a master fencer who studied under the best fencing master in the world and is so amazing that he created and named his own unstoppable fencing move! OF COURSE he is. He's a master of espionage and disguise who managed to cross the Sahara and sneak into Mecca disguised as a local! OF COURSE HE IS. He knows kung fu and can punch a man out in one hit!" And so on.

5. Uh, shouldn't you know that?: For all the exposition the characters provide and for all of Burton's mastery of everything in the universe, there are some really weird and glaring omissions. Burton hangs out with the Libertines. He is friends with them. He debates their philosophy with them. Yet, halfway through the book, he inexplicably requires a "conversation" (read: long winded lecture) to clarify who the Libertines are. Dude, you were just in their club debating philosophy with them. Why is this conversation happening? (See comments on poorly incorporated exposition.)

6. Linguistic oddities: so, Mr. Hodder is well acquainted with the thesaurus, and it shows. This is occasionally awesome, but it more often comes across as a bit fake. When the author repeats the same titles eleven million times throughout the book because he can't think of another way of phrasing things but then yanks "ingress" out of thin air instead of "entrance" or "door," something is up.

Also, it jarred me when he would go from throwing around curse words to using prim language. There's a scene where he describes a yard littered with "dog (excrement)," but then goes on to say a cop fell on his "bottom." Um...okay? We were all excited by cursing four lines ago, and now we're back to kindergarten language?

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Solid reading of a classic

Revisado: 07-17-15

Would you listen to Something Wicked This Way Comes again? Why?

Yes; I liked the narrator's style, and Bradbury has an amazing way with words.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Charles Holloway, of course, is the star of the show. He and Atticus Finch (Mockingbird version) are the quintessential "dad that everyone wants": smart, intelligent, loving, and fair.

Any additional comments?

If you liked Stephen King's Needful Things, this is the original version.

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Annoying voice acting; great story

Revisado: 07-17-15

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

The title covers it: the story is fantastic, but many of the voices in the cast are supremely irritating. Abbot Mortimer sounds like a bad imitation of John Cleese's Nearly Headless Nick. Matthias isn't bad, but he has a tendency to put pauses in bizarre places, which gets old. As he is the main character, this wears quickly.

What other book might you compare Redwall to and why?

It's a pretty generic hero story, with the minor exception that the hero's a mouse. It has a lot of the same feel as Star Wars (innocent hero embracing an unexpected destiny, gaining friends and learning his own identity in the process).

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

NOPE. It was one of my favorite books as a child, I still re-read it occasionally as an adult, and I couldn't STAND the audio version past Chapter 3. I tried, but argh.

But hey, I listened to those three chapters in one sitting. Does that count?

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Great story, occasionally painful reading

Revisado: 02-11-13

If you could sum up The Hobbit in three words, what would they be?

"Please. Stop. Singing."

What do you think the narrator could have done better?

Granted, it's very hard to deal with a cast of 14-15 characters, but many of the characters' voices made me want to stop listening altogether. The narrator's default voice for every person other than most of the dwarves is a stuffy, old-fashioned sounding affair. Think of how you would imagine a stereotypical, British, upper-middle class grandfather of the 1940s to sound. Congratulations. You have heard Bilbo, Elrond, Gandalf, the LakeTown Master, and pretty much everyone over 4 feet tall. Thorin gets more of the same, but with an extremely affected, trying-to-be-posh inflection to top it off. However, on the dwarves, the narrator goes to the opposite extreme. Every single dwarf has his own "unique" voice, and most of these are incredibly annoying. Fili and Kili sound like idiots. They speak in a veeeerrrrrryyyy slllloooowwwwww, overly deep voice and mumble through consonants. They sounded, actually, rather like Crabbe and Goyle from Harry Potter. The voice made me think that the author was implying that they were extremely stupid goons.I would have preferred less "personalization" and more "reading what Tolkien actually wrote," as he's pretty good at identifying the speaker. The mixed-up, everyone-is-arguing parts are supposed to be muddled, so it's extremely unnecessary to inject a separate voice for everyone.This became utterly unbearable during the singing portions. In the narrator's defense, it is hard to come up with tunes for Tolkien's stuff, and it is acutely awkward to expect someone to sing a page's worth of unwritten melody, but augh! I had to fast forward through the elf songs. Rather than "elvish" or "merry" or "different but appealing" or anything Tolkien implied, the elvish music is closer to, "stuffy old guy blissed out on something very relaxing and probably illegal." By contrast, the narrator seems to be trying to rush through the dwarf songs, setting them at an overly brisk cadence and singing them as if he wants to get through as quickly as possible and is rather bored of the song. Awful stuff.

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

No; I liked parts of it, but the songs always made me abandon the story for at least a day or so, and the voices grated on my nerves.

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A fitting tribute to both the book and the movies

Revisado: 02-11-13

What did you love best about Star Wars: Dark Force Rising?

Fair warning: I am a huge Star Wars nerd and love the print versions of these books. This set the bar EXTREMELY high, but the audiobooks are arguably better than the print version. (Yeah, really.)Between the narration and the touches of the original soundtrack that the editors wove in at key points, it really felt as through the book was part of the Star Wars universe. Better yet, the music made otherwise unlikeable characters more understandable. I didn't think it would be so compelling, but small details such as throwing in the sad music from Darth Vader's funeral as the narrator spoke of Captain Pellaeon's memory of watching the Executor crash into the Death Star made his mental anguish seem substantially more sympathetic. (Considering that he's one of the "bad guys" and not entirely likeable, getting any sympathy is tough.) Star Wars wouldn't be the same without Williams's soundtrack, so it was a good play to incorporate that.

What about Marc Thompson’s performance did you like?

I really enjoyed his take on the characters' voices. I was terrified that he would mess up Thrawn, but Thompson made Thrawn seem cool, calculating, and impeccably cultured to the point of being utterly alien. (Convenient, that.) His version of Captain Pellaeon is also very well done. Thompson aced the loyal, highly military, bright-but-not-bright-enough, Empire's man who is totally aware of his lack of genius. He injected the right tough of awkwardness into interactions with Thrawn, making it heartily apparent how utterly out of his depth the Captain knows he is and how totally flatfooted most of Thrawn's decisions make the Captain feel.I also really, really, really appreciated that Thompson managed to convey "this is a woman speaking" without falling into the trap of affecting a high pitched, squeaky voice. (Ahem, Jim Dale.) Leia actually sounded Leia-ish in inflection.

Any additional comments?

My only real criticism of the book is that Thompson's read on Mara made me really dislike her. He took the "bitter" thing and blew it up to mammoth proportions. Yeah, she's a bitter character, but ai! Enough!

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Excellent Mood

Revisado: 02-11-13

Would you consider the audio edition of Call of Cthulhu and Other Stories to be better than the print version?

In some ways, yes. The narrator did an excellent job of capturing Lovecraft's somewhat hysterical, overblown, exaggerated writing style without excessively dramatic flourishes. (I was pretty worried about that -- most stories do revolve around characters going insane, and Lovecraft's descriptions are sort of over the top, so I was expecting a multiple hour verbal freakout.)

The touches of soundtrack also added to the mood. The music isn't constant, but there are occasional snippets of spooky music.

Any additional comments?

Listeners should note that this work dates from the 1920s. Every now and then, Lovecraft will throw in a description that is not exactly polite by today's standards. (For example, his descriptions of voodoo rituals are definitely not PC.) It's not malicious; it's just the style of the time. However, be warned.

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