L Gray

Non-native narrator, mostly textbook not story

Reviewed: 08-03-22

I was expecting mostly short stories for beginners. They don’t start until several hours into the audiobook. That’s bad enough, but then the narrator starts reading and it’s blatantly obvious that she’s not a native speaker, and her pronunciation isn’t even very good. Honestly, it sounds like she’s speaking Esperanto, not Spanish at all.

Can’t recommend at all. Waste of a credit.

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Good info, soooooo repetitive

Reviewed: 07-10-22

So I feel weird giving this a bad review, because the subject matter is both fascinating and horrifying, and it’s something that should absolutely be written about…

But. This reads like a college student was writing for a minimum word count and didn’t have enough material to work with so they padded the dickens out of it. This isn’t a terribly long audiobook but I swear the actual content could be comfortably fit into one hour instead of five.

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Couldn’t get into the narration

Reviewed: 05-26-21

I’ve liked these books for a while - silly escapism with a side of sexy bdsm fun. As an audiobook it just didn’t work for me. I’m not saying the narrator was bad, per se, but I don’t think this is the right book for her. Her british accent was really bad and the sex scenes just made me giggle.

I’ll stick to the kindle version for this series, I guess.

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My favorite Valdemar book, but poorly narrated.

Reviewed: 10-02-20

This book has been one of my favorite entries in the Valdemar world for a long time. I've long wanted to have it in an audiobook format. Unfortunately, the narration is... not great. It's not un-listenable, but it's stilted and awkward. The narrator's intonation makes it almost sound like a computer is narrating instead of a real person - the emphasis is often placed at weird places in a sentence. She also often speaks v e r y s l o w l y. The main character is meant to be a young military woman, but the performance gives her voice no energy at all. The narrator makes some stylistic choices that I also don't like (certain accents for particular characters, for instance), but that's more about my personal preference than anything. The bigger problem is that the narration overall seems poor quality - more like an amateur audiobook recording from a free website than the quality I usually expect from audible.

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1 person found this helpful

Story doesn’t stand on its own

Reviewed: 10-23-19

So I’ve got a couple issues with this audiobook.

First off, the story. The biggest issue I see is that this book doesn’t stand on it’s own. It’s supposedly the first installment of a series, but a lot of it doesn’t make much sense unless you’ve already read the author’s Mercy Thompson books, as well as the prequel novella. The novella, especially, really should have just been included as the first few chapters of this book - they’re really one story together, not two separate ones. It’s also really obvious that this is a spin-off series - much of what makes it interesting is the insight you get into characters that were intriguing from the Mercy Thompson books. That’s alright if you’re already a fan, but if you’re coming into this “Book 1” raw, the characters and storyline struggle to stand on their own. It just doesn’t draw me in the way I expect from a series opening novel. Really, I feel the whole series struggles from this issue - I keep reading because of the tidbits I learn about Mercy Thompson’s world, not because of any real investment in Anna or Charles, the main characters of their own series.

My other problem is the narration. It’s not necessarily bad - the narrator is competent enough. I’m mostly puzzled by the choice of a male narrator for a series that is primarily from the POV of a female character. It’s jarring for me to listen to the romantic feelings and sexual exploits of a female character in a man’s voice. Sure, the POV does sometimes switch to male characters throughout this series, but it’s definitely not the majority or even half of the time.

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7 people found this helpful

Not the right narrator for this book

Reviewed: 08-27-15

So this is a high paced sword and sorcery adventure story, and the narrator seems to have turned it into an audio tranquilizer. Painfully slow narration, with odd pacing and inflections and strange accents and voice choices for the characters. Sometimes it almost sounded like the book was being read by a text-to-speech program instead of a human actress.

Ultimately, it was unlistenable for me. I've loved these books for years, but I'll have to go on loving them as *books* and not audiobooks, because this was a total bust. Especially disappointing because I really enjoyed listening to the audiobook versions of Mercedes Lackey's 500 kingdoms series, as well as the Elemental Masters series. A pity that her flagship Valdemar series received such lackluster treatment.

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14 people found this helpful