The Explainer

Good story, terrible narrator

Reviewed: 09-08-24

I’m persevering through the series because the story is engaging and the characters well developed, but omg this narrator is distractingly bad.

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Good story but hard to keep the characters straight

Reviewed: 08-25-24

Great narration and compelling story. I hope the next in the series has character names that are not so similar. Too many dudes with similar sounding names and similar job descriptions.

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May be considered a classic....more like classically sexist

Reviewed: 01-18-19

Interesting premise and I did manage to get to the end but it took a fair amount of eye rolling and teeth gritting. The two primary alien races both have non-sentient females. The two human and humanoid females are 1. A good luck charm and an infantilised sex partner and 2. A ‘galactic ship whore’. Between comments like “I should bring a woman in stasis in all my trips” and “you’re smarter than I expected for a ship whore’’, this ‘classic’ maybe needs to stay on the shelf. Needless to say, I won’t be listening to any more Larry Niven. The narrator was excellent. I may look for other books read by him.

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Good story almost ruined by a sub-par narrator

Reviewed: 10-16-16

While it makes sense to have a female narrator for the story, this one was so wooden and formal, lacking greatly in emotional range, it damn near ruined what was an highly anticipated book. I realize I'm spoiled by Tim Currie's superb rendering of the first three books, but the dryness of delivery in this telling made it hard to stay focused. I found myself having to backtrack to follow the story.

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1 person found this helpful

Great tomboy herione, but....

Reviewed: 08-13-15

Any additional comments?

I enjoyed the Septimus Heap books and was excited to discover a continuation of that story line with a female lead. Unlike others, I was also excited for a female narrator. I'm irritated when publishers choose male narrators for female led plots and Nicola Barber did an excellent job. However, Angie Sage's use of characters making ridiculously willful "mistakes" as a plot device became very tiresome by the end of the book. Too many characters bring everyone into extreme danger because they are being naive or emotional or just inexplicably stupid, despite being meticulously careful and clever up to that point. There was a fair amount of this in the Septimus books as well, but there was just too much of it in Pathfinder to keep me interested.

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Couldn't put it down!

Reviewed: 05-28-15

Any additional comments?

Lockwood and Co. comprises a compelling story, good characters and fantastic narration. A great little alt-history narrative that flips the whole steam punk 'new technology in Victorian times' genre on it's head and makes old technology more useful in modern times (while keeping the actual time period ambiguous enough to prevent the story from becoming dated too quickly). Stroud gives the characters dialogue that is neither too loaded down with slang nor too staid to keep you from believing these are real teenagers. Miranda Raison is pitch perfect; her male character voices are believable and her emotional tone never goes astray. I can't wait to listen to the next installment and I will look for other books narrated by Ms. Raison.

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Compelling story line, Truly awful view of women

Reviewed: 11-11-14

Any additional comments?

The story is compelling and the ideas are interesting. Rudnicki is a great narrator, getting the tone and emotional content right. Rankin can be a little two dimensional at times, making characters seem insipid. What killed this story for me was the fact that almost every female character under the age of 40 behaves as a sexual predator or a mindless baby machine. Between this and the first book there are 6 female characters that are seducing by deception or trying to force themselves on male characters, 3 of which are around the age of 16. Add to that one count of infanticide by a mother (when that baby she wanted so badly was rendered superfluous), one count of rape by possession and one count of sexual molestation of a 12 year old boy by a 20 year old woman and it starts to add up to Card having a fairly sickening view of women. I can think of exactly two women in the entire series that are smart, powerful and not on the make. I remember vividly what it was like to be a teenage girl hopped up on hormones and wanting to be found attractive by boys, but by the time the 3rd teenage girl (not including the 20 year old from the 1st book) is yanking Danny's pants down and telling him she "wants his baby in her" my eye's rolled right out of my head. I have deeply loved Card's books in the past, but he lost me for good on this one.

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Great Premise killed by a TERRIBLE narrator

Reviewed: 04-06-13

What did you like best about Uglies? What did you like least?

Despite the potential for this premise to bury us under a mountain of silly metaphors, the author does a great job of making you constantly question which side you might come down on. The plot twists are great....which is what got me through this absolutely abysmal narrator. Most of her teen voices sound like some whacked out hippie doing a "scary" voice and her adults are equally cartoonish. Now I get that the point of the book is about stereotypes....but a little subtlety would have gone a loooooong way. I did manage to make it through all three books, but it was a real struggle. I wish that I had just given up and read the books. She does a good job with the emotional content, (ie there was never a moment when I thought..."that's clearly not how the author meant that to come out") but I haven't met that many teenagers that sound like they just smoked an entire field of weed.

What other book might you compare Uglies to and why?

Why yes! they doo remind me a lot of The Hunger Games. I would LOVE to read a book of this genre that did NOT contain a love triangle.

How did the narrator detract from the book?

see above

Could you see Uglies being made into a movie or a TV series? Who should the stars be?

Yes, this would make a great set of movies. I suspect they will be after The Hunger Games have run their course.

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1 person found this helpful