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Storyline not as described

Reviewed: 08-17-24

It wasn’t the story that the title and summary had led me to expect. Not really a history of the lost Scottish breed, though that was certainly mentioned, but primarily a very long drawn out complaint about how the Orkney Islands were being unfairly treated by Scottish regulations that didn’t apply to the Orkneys. The author did a fairly good job of narration—better than many other authors—and her voice was pleasant enough. But I bought the title because I wanted to hear about the sheep.

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Waste of money

Reviewed: 11-05-21

I very much enjoyed the printed book when I read it years ago, and was looking forward to the audio book. Alas, the narrator pretty much ruined it. Poor articulation, poor pronunciation, just really bad. I'd send it back if I could.

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Fine performance

Reviewed: 07-09-21

Davina Porter’s rendition of the various personalities is nothing short of amazing.

Other than that, I kept waiting for an explanation of how Roger, Brianna and the children made it from 1739 to 1779 without getting any older.

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Would have preferred the original

Reviewed: 11-21-20

Everyone knows the Harry Potter books by now, but may not realize that there are two versions. This is the ‘Americanized’ one with the British versions of many words and phrases replaced with the American ones. I read the original version when it was first published, and the differences were jarring in some places.

The narrator had nice pacing and inflection but didn’t do the different voices as well as many others. It was still good storytelling, if not a superb rendition of different characters.

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A few serious lapses

Reviewed: 12-25-19

I generally love Laurie R. Kong’s writing but she got a few things completely wrong in this one. Just for starters, no one who has been without food and water for six days is going to have his voice back after a half cup of water and be standing on his own after eating a crust of bread and a dried fig. He’s going to be dead. Secondly, even if it had been a shorter period of time or the prisoner had at least been provided with water, anyone who has been shackled in one place for any extended period is going to be covered in feces and urine. Not to mention so painfully stiff that he would not be moving on his own. It wouldn’t have taken much research to get that right.

I did very much like the historical detail in this book.

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1 person found this helpful

Not one of Laurie R. king’s best

Reviewed: 12-07-19

Nice tie-in with Locked Rooms, but it’s hard to imagine Mary Russell relegating her mother’s garden journals to the attic, or selling the family home without retrieving them and other significant items.

Kate Martinelli irritates me, but it’s hard to say why. Her characterization feels as though Ms. King was trying to please two points of view—the one that portrays women as strong and fearless and the one that wants to see them subordinate to their male co-workers, emotionally fragile and unable to make decisions. Mary Russell is by far a more believable personality, even with the occasional disconnect between someone who allegedly took a degree in chemistry and the person who needs some fairly basic chemistry explained to her by Holmes.

Alyssa Bresnahan does a poor job of creating distinct voices to go with the different characters, but at least she doesn’t mispronounce half the words. After listening to Jenny Starlin’s rendition of the Mary Russell stories, anyone else is going to take a back seat. Robert Ian McKenzie was a familiar voice for Holmes and did reasonably well with the different characters in his section of the story.

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Fascinating

Reviewed: 10-27-19

It’s a pleasure, and a bit amusing, to listen to someone with Robert Hazen’s passion for the subject speaking of minerals almost as if they were alive—‘mineral species’ and ‘mineral evolution,’ for example. Both terms are technically correct, of course, yet we don’t typically think of minerals in that light. I bought this expecting it to be one more explication of ‘how the world began,’ though with Dr. Hazen’s particular views on the subject. It was far far more than that. I couldn’t possibly get all the details in one pass through the book, and expect to listen to it several times more.

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Excellent discourse on carbon

Reviewed: 10-22-19

Robert Hazen is one of the big names in mineralogy and origin of life research. He’s also a highly respected musician (he played trumpet professionally all during his active career in science). Music and science are my two parallel careers as well, so I was very happy to see this book on Audible. Unfortunately, the very low key narration took some of the excitement out of what should have been a most enjoyable book. The only thing that saved it from being almost a monotone was the narrator’s excellent enunciation. Even so, his voice was so uninflected and soft at times that it was difficult to understand the words. And of course, the narration was sprinkled with all the typical mispronunciations that occur whenever a person untrained in the sciences tries to read even a lay scientific publication (no, ‘molybdenum’ is not pronounced ‘Molly-Be-denim’). Doesn’t anyone scan such books to find terms likely to be mispronounced?

I’m sure I will listen to this again, even with the shortcomings in the narration.

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16 people found this helpful

Much of what the author predicted has already come to pass

Reviewed: 06-26-19

Very slightly dated in a couple of places, but otherwise both a compelling explanation of how human physiology and society developed and a chilling forecast of how we are probably going to disappear.

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Odd pronunciation in some places

Reviewed: 04-26-19

Others have commented on the very dated view of autism so I won’t repeat that. I was put off by Christina Moore’s incorrect pronunciation of some common words, after her pretty much flawless performance otherwise.

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