M. Layton

Not a clear recording

Revisado: 06-21-24

I listened to this exact recording years ago on cassette tape. It was much clearer than this digital copy, unfortunately. It’s a shame.

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Better with an American narrator

Revisado: 11-21-23

LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY is a great book with an important and often very funny storyline, Those who remember the 1960s will appreciate many of the events and cultural references. Why the publisher chose a British narrator escapes me. While Miranda Raison does a fairly decent job with a North American accent, it does slip at least once for a couple of sentences, and she did pronounce “schedule” as the British do and Americans don’t. Neither she nor her editor bothered to find out how to pronounce TV exercise guru Jack Lalanne’s name the way he did, and there were other similar problems too. Sometimes it’s just better to get a narrator from the country where a story takes place. That aside, I highly recommend this wonderful novel.

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If you like SLIDING DOORS...

Revisado: 04-15-23

There are many similarities between this book and the movie SLIDING DOORS; however, the author chooses another way to end the story. I think I prefer a more definite ending, and I definitely had a preference on which man to choose, but I absolutely loved the inclusion of the alternate universe theory at the end. Narrator Julia Whelan did an unusually breathy voice for the narration, which caused the male characters to sound a little off. It's not a choice I liked, really, and normally I love her narration.

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Fun love story, wonderful characters

Revisado: 09-01-21

This is a really fun love story, with wonderful lead characters. However, the author is in serious need of an editor. Grammar is a slight problem, but the other mistakes—both in simple arithmetic and forgetting where the main character is from (not America) are distracting. The story is so good that I’m willing to overlook these problems to get to the forthcoming sequel, but I hope Armstrong gets an editor who’s paying attention. Someone needs to.

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Cliffhanger

Revisado: 08-24-21

This book seemed a little long, but I enjoyed the relationships between the characters. The ending was quite different from my expectations, although I don’t know if I believe all its complexity. The epilogue is a real cliffhanger. The narrator is excellent with voice characterization, pacing, and accuracy. I highly recommend EISENBERG and this author; I’ve listened to several of his novels. Suspense and realism combine. You’ll learn quite a lot about the differences and similarities between the German court system and that of the United States in this one.

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Mary Stewart's Most Complex Heroine

Revisado: 09-10-20

As I've been making my way through the new recordings of Stewart's novels, I've noticed that they're mostly dated by the heavy smoking the characters do. In THE IVY TREE, the lead character does smoke a lot--especially in the first half of the book, but the lead character here also says really annoying things about women being hysterical BECAUSE they're women. She was pretty unlikeable in many ways throughout much of the book, making me wonder why so many readers had said that this was their favorite Mary Stewart. However, her moral compass seems pretty true--even if that might not always seem to be clear. She's not afraid of work, and she is not spoiled or selfish. She really cares about those she loves. She doesn't fall into the arms of just any handsome man who comes along either. In the end, I came to like her, but it was hard at first.

The complaints by many about the narrator, Amy Molloy, are true. Her ability to use a North American accent is clearly trained but inconsistent at best. There are strange pronunciations for any dialect of English I've heard. Who says "tomatoes" so that the "mat" rhymes with "cat"? Molloy does. I think many of these pronunciation problems such as the vowels in "careful" and "calm," come from Molloy's Irish background, but a good editor should have caught those. Why even choose an Irish actress when there are only two Irish characters in the book? I suspect there was no real editor. Worse than all the pronunciation problems was the tediously slow reading speed and the sheer lack of ability to read well, pausing so often in the incorrect places such as between an adjective and a noun. This is really disqualifying for an audiobook reader, and the publisher is to blame for not hiring any of many really good readers such as Jennifer Ikeda, who read very well and can handle accents too. I turned the speed to 1.25x to get through the slow reading speed.

In short, this is a very good novel, with very good writing, and a complex heroine. The narrator, however, leaves much to be desired. I won't buy any more books with Amy Molloy listed as narrator.

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Not really very compelling

Revisado: 06-06-20

Neither lead character in this prequel to THE HUNGER GAMES is very compelling. As a teenager, Coriolanus Snow is very conflicted given his family's previous high status and his experiences during the war that ended ten years earlier, but his transition to the evil incarnate despot of the original trilogy isn't very clear. It's hard to get invested in him because he's never really likeable or totally unlikeable. Lucy Gray Baird, the tribute from District 12, is also a character who never seems clearly defined. Does she love Coriolanus or not? Is she a rebel or not? Perhaps if Collins had chosen to tell this story in the first person, at least one character would have been more clearly defined. I don't know. Certainly there's no real exciting action, and the "games" themselves also lack any real dramatic tension.

There are moments in the plot when you can see that Collins was working backwards from THE HUNGER GAMES. How do you make people want to watch such a spectacle? How were the muttations created? How was the mentoring system created? Exploring those questions more deeply might also have made the book more interesting to read.

Finally, the narrator is good but not great for this book. He does different voices for different characters. He's good with both male and female voices. My biggest objection is the lack of singing since there's so much singing in the book. It's okay to "speak-sing" Coriolanus's "singing" of the anthem because his singing is described that way--though something more on the line of Rex Harrison's singing in MY FAIR LADY would have been better. However, ALL the singing is done that way,(even for well-known songs such as "Oh My Darling Clementine,") and it's really annoying. In the end, I had to fast forward through the songs because I couldn't take any more of that style of narration.

In the end, the book simply is not very compelling. If you're looking for THE HUNGER GAMES, stop looking. This isn't it.

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Slow start improves

Revisado: 09-04-19

I bought this novel because I visited Lüneburg in 2017 and wanted to revisit the city in fiction. The novel ends up a pretty good police procedural about the investigation of a serial killer’s crimes, but it started very slowly. I think the exposition of the detectives’ lives before they meet in the novel should have been cut at the start and interspersed more through the actual plot. The novel was good enough for me to buy the next book in this series.

I marked the narrator down because although she reads very well, she does no voice characterization at all, which makes it hard at the beginning to know when it’s the killer’s point-of-view being represented instead of one of the detectives’.

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What genre is this?

Revisado: 08-10-19

In the end, my feelings about this novel weren’t very strong, and I decided it was because it didn’t fit anywhere. It’s not science fiction though time travel is the source of most of the action. It’s not historical fiction either because its purpose is not to tell us anything much about the early nineteenth century or even about Jane Austen. It’s also not a romance novel, though the protagonists fall in love. That lack of a focus simply produced very little in the way of a reaction in me.

I also thought the narrator, Saskia Maarleveld, was generally quite good, switching easily between American and British English accents, but she needs to be better educated to avoid pronunciation errors such as the total failure to pronounce Anthony Trollope‘ s name correctly. There were others, but that was really indicative of a lack of knowledge of English literary history. Given the subject of this novel, that should be something directors/editors listen for.

Disappointing in the end

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Too bad the original audiobook isn’t available

Revisado: 02-11-19

I listened to the original book read by Tim Curry alone when it came out years ago. Curry was unbelievably good. As Mr. Poe, you’d have thought he was going to cough up a lung. As the voice of Lemony Snicket alone, he’s still very good, but the original was excellent. This is a good performance, but it’s not the original.

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esto le resultó útil a 3 personas