Joel Cagle

This girl is an idiot!

Revisado: 03-04-25

The good: the writing (from a technical perspective) is very good, his world building is full, and gives you a good feel for the environment, and the narration is fantastic! now on to the bad...this is the most unlikable whiney thickheaded and most contrarian MC I have come across in a long time (probably since Ernest Clines Armada) I am having a hard time articulating just how aggravating she is, I am a few chapters from the end, and I got to tell you, I'm rooting for the wearwolves at this point.

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Lisa is driving me to start reading again!6

Revisado: 09-04-24

I love the SPI books and listen to them quite often, but I couldn't even make it through half this book. I understand that there is difficulties in self publishing and I admire Lisa for giving her fans an audiobook, but her talents do not lie in narration. she basically reads the book at you. poor pacing, no difference between character voices, it all just kind of runs together. I really hate to leave this review but a change has to be made. I will be returning this audiobook and I will buy it in print. I will find the time to read it because I really do enjoy her writing, but I can't listen anymore.

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I blame the producers

Revisado: 06-01-24

I will start by saying the writing is great as always. there is some overlap, and rehashing but from different points of view, but all in all it's good backstory and gap filler. i will also say the narrators do as good a job as can be expected considering the lazy ass producers. on to the negative, again the production lacks. This book suffers from the same bad decisions as The Wilmington years short stories. I know Audible knows how to produce audiobooks with dual narrators they do it for other authors. so why do they continuously screw this up for such a prolific author??? When you have dual narrators the guy does all the guy voices the female does all the female voices, and you pick one of them to do ALL of the inbetween narration. These yahoos have both narrators doing ALL the voices ALL the time and it's just sloppy. you end up with two completely different voices for each character and its just freaking stupid. It chaps my ass to have such good writing destroyed by such lazy production. I really hope they figure things out as they start producing full books again.

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wow Jim Dale is awful!

Revisado: 08-02-23

I don't understand why there's a British recording and an American recording. the British version is narrated by Stephen Fry and he does an UNBELIEVABLE job! I swear you are listening to the movies. I'm serious i wish you all could get your hands on the correct version! Look I get why people love this version, it's because they don't know wnay better. I'm sure a hamburger is fantastic if you've never had a steak. unfortunately I've had the steak and the hamburger is just meh. Sorry Jim you just don't stack up to Stephen. I don't know who made this particular call in the production department, if it was J.K. or if it was Audible, but whoever it was needs to be fired, them let the whole world hear the correct version of Harry Potter.

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Great Writing, crappy producers.

Revisado: 07-14-23

I will start with the story is awesome! They delivered once again. My problem is with the production. In short it sucked, and where the hell is Renee Raudman? The narrators did as aood as could be expected, the voices are distinct and have a male voice for Curran is great. The problem is he only voices Curran half the time. That's because the producers are idiots. The main issue with this type of two narrator system is you get two people voicing ALL of the voices. The proper way is to let the female narrator do the female voices, the male narrator do the male voices and pick ONE to do all of the narration! That way you have one voice per character. Again not the narrator's fault, it a sign of a lazy producer who doesn't want to put the time in the editing room. (Want a great examle? Go listen to The Valens Heritage series) Now, the other big issue is all of the mispronounced words/names/places. Did anyone even listen to any of the previous 10 books? Obviously not, again this falls squarely on the producers shoulders. It's their job to keep continuity and to, I don't know, ASK if they're not sure. I don't know how much imput the authors have in the audiobook process, but if they let it slide too, that's very disappointing. Anyway enjoy the stories the best you can. The writing is fantastic as always. I just wish the did a better job on the production.

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It's a fun book.

Revisado: 02-18-23

I really like when an author goes back and fills in the blanks. John does a masterful job of fleshing out, a lot of the breadcrumbs that he has dropped along the way. the only story he started but I feel he left out was the training session after the wood chopping bet. I would have like that. oh well I guess you can't have everything, can you. if you like the series you will like this, bur as other reviews have stated it should be after Executable not before God Touched, it will do more to confuse new readers as an Introduction than anything else.

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A good old fashioned space adventure

Revisado: 12-17-22

So I just finished Summer's End. I really liked it. Its been a long time since I read straight Sci-fi, and I have to say I have been listening to fantasy so long, a part of me was waiting for a Shifter, or maybe some dwarves to pop up 🤣🤣 but obviously they never did. It was a good ol fashioned space adventure. If you want to tag along as a kid leaves Earth for the first time, and see what growing up hard and fast does to your prospects in space, give it a listen! The narrator was serviceable, his reading was very natural and his performance of the main character is very good. My only criticism is he doesn't have a lot of voices in his stable. A lot of characters sounded the same after a while. Not like say Leland King (narrator of the Valens Legacy) that dude had hundreds of characters by the end, and damn near had a distinct voice fir all of them. All in all I give it an A+

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it's OK

Revisado: 10-30-22

overall it was a fairly entertaining story. I have two complaints. First (and this may change over time), from the description and all inferences, the series is about John Smoke, yet, for now anyway, everything is from Agent Shaw's point of view. This leads me to my second issue. Only once before has a writer made such an unlikable main character (go check out Armada by Earnest Cline). John Smoke is fine, fairly well written, witty and even charming at points, but Agent Shaw is an obstinate, Contrarian douche of an agent. The hypocrisy of her militant by the book attitude except when it's inconvenient for her just makes you was to slap her. I see what the author was going for, making her contrary to everytging Smoke says and does to try and build sexual tension (oh I agree with him, but I can't let him know that. he might think I like him, yadda yadda) but it's not even that subtle. Smoke "i want pancakes" Shaw "no" Smoke "but I'm hungry" Shaw damn I'm hungry too "i don't care if you're hungry " on and on. It gets old fast. I mean by like chapter 3 fast. I like the premise and I am looking forward to seeing where the story goes. I just hope agent Shaw gets an attitude adjustment before too long or most of this series will go unlistened to.

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it eventually got going.

Revisado: 03-27-21

RC Bray turns in another master performance, but the first 9 chapters of the story are kind of dry. I had a couple of false starts with this one, because it was just so much world building, and character background. now I am glad I stuck it out! not only does the book hit high gear in chapter 10 (you won't put it down after that) but also all that world building pays off in later books. It's just a bit of a slog to get there. The author does get to the good stuff a little faster in subsequent books. I have listened to them all and I can assure you that if you tough it out, you will be glad you did! RC Bray is once again proves why he is one of the best (if not the best) narrator in the biz. The best compliment I can pay a narrator, I think, is to tell people that when you listen to one of his performances, you forget this is one person doing all of the voices! The consistency of performance, line to line, is a HUGE! Credit not olnly to his ability, but also the quality of editor/producer he worked with. So to sum up, if you can stick it out to chapter 10, you won't stop for the next 10 books :-)

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What a slap to R.C. Bray's face!

Revisado: 01-07-20

I will start by saying I tend to like Will Wheaton. I listen to RPO at least once a month, not to mention all the John Scalzi books I listen to, that he has narrated. That being said, this performance was awful. He reads the book at you, he does not perform it. To me, it is like when Alexa reads me a book (try it, ask Alexa to read an ebook you bought from Amazon.....I dare you!). The story is an AMAZING one. Andy Weir knocked this book out of the park! I can't say enough about this AS A BOOK, but I feel like the people raving about this version have never heard an audiobook before. I can't see how anyone can prefer this version, when compared to the job R.C. Bray did. If I were him I would be livid! Turns out he's a better man than I am. the truth is, this disaster of a recording came about because of money. The audio rights with Podium Publishing ended (audio rights usually last 7 years), and it turns out that Audible bought the audio rights to the book, but not the performance commissioned by Podium. So they would need to re-record it. To be fair Audible did ask Bray to record the book again, but apparently weren't willing to pay him what he is worth. So now, not only do we have a lesser product, we can't even get our hands on the original anymore. Audible really dropped the ball on this one, and all because of a couple bucks.

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