Bradley

Interesting Plot idea, execution needs work

Revisado: 11-02-21

First the stuff that might make you stop listenening before you get to what is good about this book.

The narrator has some good points - her enunciation is clear and I can always tell who is speaking, her voices are distinct. However it seems like she worked so hard on those aspects that she lost the ability to read naturally. There are unnatural pauses between words which make it sound less like reading a story than an actor trying desperately to remember lines or somebody sounding out words, and this is so strong in the dialog I honestly can't tell if the dialog is bad, or just badly narrated.

To this is the fact that the world (which is not ours, that's fine) appears to be constructed of 1980s movie tropes. That is every character and many of the scenes are straight expies from movies, even to identical names. To give an example, the protagonists power starts to manifest in a scene that is a cross between "Nobody Leaves Without Playing the Blues" and the Blues Brothers adventure playing for a Country Western crowd. I honestly though the characters enhanced abilities were because she was in a babysitter role at the time while on the run from criminals and because of the world-construction, she was getting "Adventures in Babysitting" superpowers. I found all of this very distracting and not especially enjoyable when it turned out that the world is just like this, it isn't important to the plot. As the real plot progresses this fades more into the background and becomes less distracting.

Now the good....the reason I didn't stop reading (aside from a tendency to finish books I start, no matter how flawed) is that the driving plot itself and the protagonist was actually a kind of cool concept. Without spoilers - it is entirely believable that a teenage girl in highschool with the protagonist's background would never know she had powers, largely because of the social dynamics at play. I kinda got into the story at that point.

I might give the author and even the narrator another chance, at least with a free credit. The former has some storytelling ideas but I'd prefer something that isn't in a mashup of pop culture tropes as worldbuilding UNLESS that somehow tied into the story being told. The narrator - I'd need to hear a sample to make sure she'd gotten past whatever her issue was with pauses reading this book. She's actually good at voices - making them distinct without relying overly on accents, but unless she can learn to narrate in a more natural way, I won't be buying any more from her if the sample doesn't sound better.

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Not just about Rome

Revisado: 11-06-09

This book covers not just battles and kings, but culture, religion and reasons for conflict. The author uses primary sources and is a 19th century "age of reason" Englishman. This means he is a bit condescending to women and thinks constitutional monarchy is the best guaranter of freedom, but aside from that he is astonishingly fair and balanced about his treatment of the diverse religions and cultures of Romans, Byzantines, Germanic and Steppes tribes, Franks and Germans, Arab Moslems, Turkish Moslems, North Africans (pre and post Moslem) and of all the flavors of religion from Pagan to Jew to zillions of Christian flavors to Moslem that interacted between the time of Augustus and 17th century.

He has a kind of dry humor and sarcasm that he applies to everything equally. He's consistent about the virtues he admires or the faults he deplores regardless of religion or culture. This series also has the most objective view of the Crusades I've ever read.

At about $1 per hour of listening it is a tremendous value if you are at all interested in the history of the western world from about the birth of Christ and the origins of a lot of the current problems in the Middle East.

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