Excellent story, as always, but the performance?

If you could sum up The Cruellest Month in three words, what would they be?

Excellent story! Louise Penny is, as always, interesting and engaging.

What didn’t you like about Adam Sims’s performance?

Adam Sims was not sufficiently trained in pronouncing French words, which are essential in Louise Penny's writing. Every time he pronounces the psychic reader's name, I cringe, since he pronounces it in its masculine form, and the psychic is a woman... It's the kind of error that good audio editing should have caught and corrected.

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2 people found this helpful

Overall wonderful series but this one's too turgid

Any additional comments?

Don't get me wrong - I love Inspector Gameche and have really enjoyed the series so far. Like many other readers, I feel like I know Three Pines and I want to head back there this afternoon for a good rich cup of coffee. Louise Penny has done a bang-up job of creating a place so rich and real - this isn't an easy thing to do. And I'll certainly read the next in the series.

Now to my complaints about this entry in the series: the story is startling to cross over into magical realism and is doing so with a very heavy hand. A house is hulking on the landscape, evil emanating from it like stink lines. Evil and Good are Big Players in the unfolding of the plot (capitalization intended). Gameche becomes ever-more saint-like whilst his enemies are psycho-bad, harbouring grudges based on the thinnest and most ridiculous motivation. It reminded me a bit of "The Stand" by Stephen King. I enjoy some Stephen King but it just doesn't seem a fit for Three Pines. Even the minor characters are struggling with the dark night of conscience.

One of the thing I have loved so far is the utter believability of the characters. This book starts off good and then starts wringing its hands and speaking in tongues. Here's hoping she dials it down a notch in future entries.

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2 people found this helpful

The worst Louise Penny experience I've ever had...

Oh the tedium... the story itself is the true murder victim here. It's been long- drawn and quartered, its severed remains strewn across a dense forest of overwrought verbiage.
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Anyone interested in knowing what happens next must wade through acres of relentless and overwrought hyper descriptives in looped repetition.

Every morsel of food, every beverage consumed is detailed, as are the tables and chairs used. When the characters aren't eating they're thinking about food, talking about food or walking around with food. The visual, sensory, tactile and olfactory elements of every
scene are detailed in the graceless prose of travel brochures and restaurant menus...

I must point out, in the interest of fairness, that I might have found the ceaseless fillers less objectionable if someone had told the narrator how to pronounce the name of one of the central characters - basically calling her John instead of Jane with jarring repetition.

More jarring, though mercifully less repetitive, is his mispronunciation of 'Québécois'. The 's' must be silent to indicate plurality or nationhood. When the 's' is sounded, the word is a singular modifier, feminine form, meaning 'of Quebec', like the mispronounced and misgendered Jeanne (Jane)


Of course the narrator is not responsible for the manifold cultural and idiomatic offences against Québec's Two Solitudes.
I've been confused about cultural appropriation...Ms Penny has illumined me.

But who, in the name of all that is holy, decided on the form of this audiobook?
Shame on you.

There is nothing more damaging to the suspension of disbelief than assigning foreign nationalities to fictitious characters and placing them in scenes where, perversely, they are compelled to eschew their shared language and speak to each other in thickly accented English.

This production is a disaster.

A fine story, badly written. Where was the Editor?

A smug narration by someone who could read well and but could not act. Dialogue was rendered with very little nuance. People seemed to be snarling even when they were speaking kind words

I apologize for making a rant out of a review but this production pushed all my buttons. Though I suspect if the form had been worthy, the content would have been more palatable ....

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