Jessica

Narrator is SO BAD

Reviewed: 12-28-24

Encountering a narrator who doesn’t work for you isn’t uncommon. It’s typically not regular, but it happens. This guy though. His default voice is fine. Good even. But every single one of his character voices sounds like a cartoon villain. Irial is sex fae turned faerie king turned sex fae yet he sounds like he should be twirling his mustache while waiting for the oncoming train to run over the damsel he’s tied to the tracks.

It’s ridiculous.

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Worst Bones Ever

Reviewed: 11-10-23

The narration wasn’t awful overall, but she made Bones sound like an effeminate street rat. Gross.

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Introducing Bo-day-sha

Reviewed: 10-13-23

Overall, I’m not going to argue that Kristine Hvam is an excellent narrator. However . . . I can’t get past her pronunciation of warrior queen Boadicea as bo-day-sha which is a mm away from bodacious and just ugh. Bo-ad-da-sea-ah. Do your research.

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Love this series, however . . .

Reviewed: 05-23-23

The narrator, in most capacities, is quite good. Her voice matches the character, she’s got all the emotions down, BUT . . . she regularly mispronounces words. Hilariously so. I didn’t get all of them down, b/c it took a few for me to realize it was a pattern, not an isolated incident, but a couple of my favorites were pie-son-ic for psionic, and CAR-bin-er for carabiner.

Other than that it was very good. Just be prepared to stop and scratch your head once an hour or so.

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This is what happens when it only takes a week to write a book

Reviewed: 02-20-23

There are so many problems with this story, but let’s focus on a heroine who unleashes a dragon on innocent bystanders to save herself, then hours later reflects on the incident with “faint” remorse and can’t bring herself “to care about the greater good.” And no, she’s not the villain and she’s not meant to be morally grey.

Then there are the bizarre/ridiculous observations. Like when Dollface was indignant about not being jailed to suit her station as a Reaver. WTF cares? You failed. You’re in jail. How would being jailed in a more dignified fashion help anything? Similarly after multiple failed attempts to Command the queen, she woke up (gagged and bound), and stated that she’d only just regained consciousness but she already knew she had failed.

Yes. Also, grass is green and the sky is blue.

It was constant.

And so many unnecessary adjectives.

The performance was fine with the exception of the aforementioned heroine’s girlish voice which was grating, but that’s my only complaint on that front.

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10 people found this helpful

Great story, cornball musical accompaniment.

Reviewed: 07-14-18

McClarty was an excellent narrator, and I got used to the somewhat grating voice of his female counterpart. What I didn’t get used to was the ridiculous musical embellishments that faded in and out of key scenes. I’ve listened to other audiobooks with similar accompaniment, and it hasn’t bothered me, so in and of itself the music isn’t the issue. In this case, however, it was both distracting and irritating. It reminded me of the outdated training videos I had to watch for a new job when I was a teenager. The kind of low budget film with overly enthusiastic actors and a cringe-worthy soundtrack. Without the bad music, I would have given the narration a solid 4.0+ stars.

I’m fairly new to the mystery/thriller genre—I usually stick to speculative fiction—so when I say that I had no clue what the endgame was until the MC figured it out himself, it could be my inexperience. That being said, I pegged the Bad Guy long beforehand. So six of one, half dozen of the other. But the characters were well developed, and I’ll definitely listen to more of this series.

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Terrible Narrator Switch

Reviewed: 04-24-18

While the story was everything I’ve come to expect from SJM, the narration left something to be desired. I gave it an honest shot—I truly did—but even after I’d acclimated to the new voice, I found it lacking. The narration felt generic and words were mispronounced in scenarios where the meaning would have been obvious to anyone doing more than reading a prompter. At 73%, I quit listening in favor of reading instead.

Not a happy camper.

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1 person found this helpful