Jean L

A waste of time

Revisado: 10-28-21

Other than that this book is very topical, i.e., about an out-of-control epidemic, it's not very good. As a listener, I couldn't keep the two female characters straight--there was very little character development. Maybe it's better on the page... Also, some of the plot threads are left unresolved; is this the first of a series? The first part is interesting, set on an island in a culture that is unknown to most of us. But that is left behind pretty soon.

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Bad Narrator, mediocre book

Revisado: 02-26-20

This was so disappointing! There are lots of great ideas here, but no character development, just people being nasty to each other. The only emotion anyone has is anger, whether appropriate or not for the situation. For a supposedly talented and clever person, our heroine(s) is amazingly blind, not noticing the most obvious things about the "people" around her. Like, that one is made of stone. Duh.
The reader seems to be able to express anger and sarcasm, but nothing else. For the first hour or so I thought she was doing a pretty good job, but gradually became very tired of her limited range. Why can't Audible hire better readers?

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wrong narrator

Revisado: 11-21-19

When listening to a book, the narrator is key. Susan Bennett is an excellent narrator, in that she gets the line reads right. But she sounds neither very southern or at all Jewish, and like many female readers totally bombs when trying to sound male.

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Waste of time

Revisado: 09-11-19

This book reads like the author was hoping for a movie to come out of it. There's even a barn raising scene straight out of "Witness." The courtroom scenes late in the story are silly and repetitious, going over all the ground that we already covered, sometimes word for word (like a screenplay?). The story unfolds very predictably. The narrator can't do men's voices, and has the Amish speaking at half speed, apparently to suggest that English is not their native language. She's not very good with women's voices, either. However, she gets the Amish accent pretty well. But overall, the narrator is awful. The writer is careless, trying to describe details of farm life that she knows nothing about. People are always looking deep into each other's eyes when they are in the pitch dark. She does seem to have researched Amish customs and mores fairly carefully.

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Needs to be seen

Revisado: 04-28-19

This may. be good on stage, but it's not much to listen to. On the other hand, it might not be good on stage either. It's hard to know who's talking.

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Don't bother

Revisado: 04-28-19

This is much, much too long. A waste of the time of a great narrator. This entire story, which is pretty thin, would have been fairly good if half as long. As it is, it goes on and on about nothing. This one lit a cigarette, then put it out. That one lit a cigarette and smoked it. Someone else took a sip of tea. Where was the editor? Seems like authors are lately given their heads with no reining in of their self indulgence. There is some store here, and symbolism, and allegory, but really! Who cares?

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Disappointment

Revisado: 03-12-19

Overall this was quite a disappointment. First of all, the translation seems very flat and charmless. Of course, there's no way to know if the original was that way. But it's also a little careless. For example, the word "impelled" was used when clearly the correct word should have been "compelled."
Moving on to the narrator. Her line readings are often off; her flat American accent seems wrong for an Italian book; she makes the girl's sound like Valley Girls rather than mid-century Italian low income city dwellers.
Lastly, the story. There is a flock of boys and girls, all indistinguishable from each other except their names. There is little in the way of characterization.
That said, there is some interest in learning about the kind of lives that lower middle class Italians lived at that time--the suffocating neighborhood social structure, the rigid school system, etc.

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oddly over rated

Revisado: 02-24-19

This book has three sisters, none of whom seems to have any curiosity. Granted, they've been under a form of strict mind control by astonishingly cruel parents all their lives. But we are listening to their inner thoughts. No secret rebellion, nada. When outsiders enter their world they don't ask them anything--where they come from, how they happened to wash up on the beach, do they have families, what is the outside world like... They just stare. They are hollow and viscous. Ugh. One might find this interesting as a dystopian psychological study in how to raise twisted, damaged humans. But the characters are not believable on any level. Even the visitors to the "island" seem to have no curiosity or initiative. Just murder.

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Don't waste your money

Revisado: 05-19-18

This is very short. You learn almost nothing. I wasted an entire credit for 1 hr and 11 minutes. What was I thinking?

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A little disappointing

Revisado: 02-08-18

After all the hype, I found this a little disappointing. There are a lot of interesting ideas here, but for a dystopian novel it's not in the top tier. The thing that is going wrong with the world is vague. The actual reasons for the breakdown of the government isn't explained. A baby is born dead, and we never find out if it's normal or not. The narrator doesn't seem to have looked. Odd. Anyhow, there's a lot of exciting action, so you might find yourself turning pages very fast if you were reading, but Ms Erdrich is a VERY SLOW reader.

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