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Wow this book was bad.

Revisado: 08-25-22

This was a real skunk of a book. The story was contrived, the ending was literally ripped from the pages of Scooby Doo, where the bad guy gives expository dialog with every motivation, fact and loose end. A voice from the grave! A swallowed note! A timely confession! Ugh.

So the story itself is not a thriller, it's not psychological, it's not 'scary' per se. A broke and mentally ill fiction writer, Lowen, has a meet-cute with the husband of another way more famous novelist. (The meet-cute involved someone getting run over in the road and Lowen getting splashed with the pedestrian's blood as they die, you know, that kind of meetup - this death has nothing to do with the story at all) Anyway, Lowen is hired to ghost write the remainder of the famous author's series of novels after an accident that left the novelist brain damaged. Since Lowen is broke as a joke and everyone in this story has zero personal boundaries, she moves straight into the home of the injured novelist and makes herself comfortable in the master bedroom, digging through the fridge and making proclamations about how disabled people should be placed in group living homes. Obviously she also starts having sex with the husband, and sadly even the sex scenes are so poorly written that they aren't even erotic or fun to read.

There are some side stories about sleep walking that go absolutely nowhere, we're introduced in great detail to characters that disappear and are never heard from again, there's a lot of graphic descriptions of child abuse and child murder, and lots of story real estate is given to people putting locks on the inside and outside of doors - which also has no bearing at all on the story line.

The majority of the story involves the hired writer Lowen sleeping with the husband of the disabled novelist, Verity, while digging through her home office and seeming to get zero work done on the job she was hired for because she instead finds Verity's diary - really an autobiography manuscript - and Lowen becomes obsessed with the disabled Verity's life, simultaneously trying to take Verity's place in the home/marriage as well as in taking over her book series (if she ever manages to get started on that).

The real action happens right at the end but it's so lame, it's not worth reading the boring sex scenes to get there. Essentially, everyone in this book is mentally ill and unlikable. I have no idea who we were supposed to be rooting for, if anyone, but because there's so little character development even in the (predictable) Big Reveal at the end, you're just left kind of shrugging.

I had to speed the audio up to 1.3, the main narrator did sound like Siri as someone else noted. Also it makes the book go faster, you really won't want to linger.

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Essentially a young adult book with bad science

Revisado: 06-01-21

The first thing that really bothers me about this book is that the main character isn't a good scientist. I'm willing to bet Andy Weir never asked a biologist to beta read his manuscript. And I know people who read it will listen to the language and think they are learning science, but SO MUCH of what is characterized as basic science in this book is simply wrong. So it's not even like you can learn things from reading it.

But even if I could forgive him for writing a book that features science while mischaracterizing really basic scientific things, the writing and plot development was so juvenile that it wasn't even an engaging story on top of that.

The protagonist is someone who got his degree in "molecular biology" a decade before, wrote and published a nonspecific opinion piece about life, and then started teaching 8th grade science. Does he have friends? Family? Who knows, his character is almost completely undeveloped despite being the iiteral main character. When a potential cellular life form has been found in outer space, despite there being entire Universities, government labs and private institutions all dedicated to studying potential cellular life on other planets - THIS DUDE is the person the government swoops down on and puts as second in command. Why? Because he wrote an opinion piece 10 years earlier that had (ultimately) nothing to do with this potential outer space life form.

He hasn't done research in over a decade, he isn't up to date on literally anything in his field, but let's elevate the mediocre, middle aged American dude to second in command, in charge of physics, space station design, instrument invention, international energy harvesting and the training of people who are clearly actively smarter and more informed than he is. They whisk him away to a lab to study the potential life form where despite being a molecular biologist, he uses only 8th grade physics to investigate it and then takes it upon himself to name it: astrophage. Phage has a very specific meaning in biology, it's a classification of viruses that infect bacteria. It's a really common word, you can look it up, Andy Weir could have looked it up. Yet what the main character was naming wasn't a virus at all. In fact it has "a nucleus and a mitochondria" which also has a very specific meaning that negates almost every single thing that this life form later does. Okay, whatever, suspending my biology disbelief.

So then the main character guy ends up as the sole survivor of a 3 person space mission, meets an alien, becomes an expert in: piloting a spaceship, writing cross-species vocal translation programs using microsoft excel, learning an alien language based on harmonic sound in 3 days, spaceship engineering, metal work, chemistry, relating to alien life forms as if they were a 9 year old child, software design, interstellar navigation - and our molecular biologist does none of these things using biology. Whatever.

At least in The Martian it made sense for Mark Watney to be an expert in most of the things around him, as he was an astronaut who had been specifically chosen and trained his entire career for the specific place he found himself, and on the equipment he had access to. The main character in this book literally is just a random 8th grade science teacher using a stopwatch and ruler to save multiple planets.

The narration is fine, I think Ray Porter was the right voice for this since he sounds like an old guy with a 'dad joke' kind of vibe to him, and that was definitely the vibe of this book.

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esto le resultó útil a 9 personas

Well written and relatable, surprise favorite

Revisado: 10-04-19

I don't know that much about Demi Moore beyond seeing her in a few movies growing up and probably wouldn't have bought the book if I hadn't read a few news stories about the book that surprised and intrigued me. I've read a few other celebrity autobiographies (Rob Lowe's Stories I Only Tell My Friends, another surprisingly insightful read) and find them hit or miss if you're not really into celebrity gossip - I think they're at their best when they describe a normal person handling massive fame, and all the human interest that entails. It seemed from the early reviews that this would be along those lines, so I dove in.

First, Demi Moore's voice is really unique, scratchy and beautiful, and I don't think I ever realized that about her before. It is fantastic for audio narration. She's a great reader, which makes sense for an actor, and I really appreciated the genuine emotion in her voice when she was taking ownership of some incredibly hard things later in the book. I felt everything she described.

Her early life was pretty brutal in some of the less overt ways that child abuse can manifest, and as with so many abuse scenarios it turned the corner into something far more overt after puberty. She tells that part of her life with really appropriate adult perspective. Her parents were young and troubled themselves, never seemed to mature and did a lot of damage. I really appreciated that she described this time by placing blame where it belonged, while still understanding how her parents got there and how generational trauma is passed down. It takes a lot of painful work to arrive at that place, and it's clear that she's put mature, consistent effort into this.

In contrast to Rob Lowe's books this isn't a book specifically about her life in Hollywood and behind the scenes in movies. She does talk about it in terms of her experience (how she felt while filming Striptease and GI Jane, and how the themes of both movies matched the reception of both movies at a pivotal time for women in US society) - and so you do catch a glimpse of some other actors, some famous movie lines, get some understanding of the body consciousness and the focus on women's bodies in the lead-up to certain roles - but primarily she writes about them as stages in her own life. I appreciated that so much, and it makes for a fascinating and surprisingly deep story.

She does address her two more famous marriages to actors, but relates those stories with a lot of respect. In both cases she takes ownership of the failed parts of the marriage that she was responsible for. She also places responsibility appropriately for things she had no control over. I was really impressed with how evenly she was able to articulate both of those things - it's very hard to look back and see a relatively equal division of ownership of relationship issues, but she manages to do that. And interestingly she describes two fairly typical marriage dynamics (if you remove private jets, large homes and fame) - if you pare it down to "compatibility and goals" I found a lot to relate to in her thoughts about partnerships and herself on the other side of them.

I honestly didn't expect to like and relate to her as much as I did through these stories. The way she describes building her family, the intention she put into the relationships with her daughters and the (massive, in some cases) mistakes she made - it was all very human and real. I think it takes a lot of self reflection to get to the place she is now and the book is really interesting, well written and very well narrated evidence of that.

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One of my favorites, done so well in audio!

Revisado: 08-06-18

The Mists of Avalon is one of my all time favorite books, and I was so nervous to listen to it performed as an audio book, in case it didn't live up to the experience of reading it in print and diving in to that other world. But really it was so well done, whew!

Others have recapped the book so I'm just going to focus on how beautifully told this story is of the women in the King Arthur legend. Viviane, Igraine, Morgaine, all of them smart and powerful and capable, making the hard choices and following their own paths with so much strength. The characters are so real. It's rare to read real, fleshed-out female characters in a fantasy novel and this tale completely revolves around so many of them. It's 60 hours of story telling but I never wanted it to end.

Davina Porter was a great narrator for this. I don't know what happened to her in the Outlander series where she made the main character sound like a super old woman, but in this narration she puts depth and soul into the characters and matches the tone and atmosphere of the book very well.

Fantastic all around.

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esto le resultó útil a 3 personas

Wanted so much to love this, but just dragged

Revisado: 08-06-18

I love fantasy novels, especially series, and even more so when I can get invested in the characters that have huge story arcs in fantasy series. I wanted so much to love this highly rated series but after three tries spanning several months, I just finally finished book 1, and it felt like a real slog. Why? Because despite the great writing and excellent narration, the story itself just dragged.

It starts out very strong! In terms of character development: I loved Father Chains, and he was BY FAR the most fleshed out character introduced to us, and secondarily Capa Barsavi I also had a clear picture of as the story progressed. Locke, the main character - he remains something of a cardboard cutout to me. I don't really care about him, I don't really know how he feels about anything, I just know a bunch about individual things that he does - but it never comes together as a person, just a lot of facts stacked together. Jean I have no mental image of, though I started to while he was in training. Calo and Galdo are completely throw-away generic characters. Bug, the side-kick tagalong apprentice is a bright spot in character development and I really found myself caring what happened to him. The Grey King is like 'generic evil puppet master', so ... meh, didn't care. Therefore the claim of 'I'm the Grey King!' by a new character was lost on me. The Bondsmage was interesting, but such a cliche for fantasy fiction. I just wished there was something new happening, something interesting, a new type of character or personality or magic.

As for the story line, I was riding along enjoyably enough until what I thought was the climactic scene 3/4 of the way through the book with Locke and company setting up this ruse against Capa Barsavi, and then (without spoilers) a lot of violence and action follows. Had the book wrapped up some loose ends and then set up the second book just after this, I'd have though it was interesting enough to want to read the second novel. But the story just kept going from there, tying up some of the loose ends from the Bondsmage and the long-con the group had been setting up before all the violence - great - but also adding in all of these layers of 'who stole our fortune?' searches and both sides plotting and enacting revenge plans. It was a crowded last quarter of the book and I just wasn't invested in it by the time I got there. With all the fleshed-out characters gone by this point in the book, we're only left with Locke and Jean, the two really vaguely drawn and uninteresting characters to carry the story. In truth, had Locke and Jean died and Bug and Chains remained, I'd have eagerly read book 2. As it is I just don't care enough about the remaining characters to continue.

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Eh, it was okay

Revisado: 08-04-18

This is pretty quick and shallow summer read. I really like a good multiverse story and this definitely had pieces of a good story in the book's concept, it just didn't flesh any of them out in an overly interesting way.

We have Jason, a physicist currently teaching college undergrads at a second rate University near Chicago, but formerly a reportedly brilliant researcher in his younger days, who gave up the fast track to physics fame to have a low key family life. We have some narrative ponderings about the path not taken, and some narrative descriptions of quantum theory and the multiverse. Into that set-up we have a blustery night, a Jason returning from a congratulatory pub party for a far more successful science friend, and a mysterious stranger who kidnaps our humble Jason and thrusts him into the multiverse where he spends the rest of the book contemplating the infinities of paths not taken and just trying to get back home.

I don't think there are any spoilers in that, as this is the set up you're expecting from the start. I think this story could have been told in a lot of thought provoking ways, but in this case it wasn't. It was literally just that scaffold with some action superimposed on top of it. It wasn't terrible, it was just kind of unmemorable.

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esto le resultó útil a 82 personas

Tried hard but utterly failed to be interested

Revisado: 09-30-17

I love audiobooks and have a lot of patience with slow-starters, but this was a mind numbingly boring, dust-in-the-eyes irritating, beige smear of a story line. I guess it was depressing, I know the subject matter was depressing, but I was so detached from any of the unrealistic, unrelatable characters that I really didn't feel depressed while reading it. I wasn't that involved with any of them.

First of all it took me about half the book to be able to distinguish any of the characters from each other. They were all variations on the same person. Jude was 'that person' with pain in his legs. JB was that same person slightly more outgoing. I had to keep wondering - wait, is that the one that lives with the guy with hurt legs, or is that the artist? Who's the one with the parents with the brownstone? How could the author not make the characters individual enough to even recognize from each other? Seriously these characters were so meh, and the narration so all over the place (sometimes one or the other character would be narrated with some odd accent they'd never had before) that with very few verbal indicators of who was talking, it got super confusing to attribute words to specific characters.

Also I couldn't understand why they were so constantly talking about their relationships to each other. Do men with decades of friendship actually sit around analyzing their feelings for each other? And if so, do I really want or need to read about it so often? There wasn't nothing revolutionary or revelatory in them. If I had been reading the paper or kindle book, I'd have been massively skimming.

I have to admit I gave up about 3/4 of the way through. I just didn't care what happened to any of them and had given up waiting for it to happen. When I read the synopsis later that summed up the part I hadn't read, I still didn't care and was annoyed that this was the thing that it was leading up to. Ugh.

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esto le resultó útil a 3 personas

Rare book I listened to twice!

Revisado: 09-27-17

This was a fascinating book with beautiful narration. Debbie Layton tells the story of her early indoctrination into the People's Temple cult and her rise through the ranks, relationship with Jim Jones and her eventual nail-biting escape and whistle-blowing efforts with the US government.

One of the things I loved first about her story is that she wrote it after she'd clearly spent a lot of time thinking deeply about all of the things that led her and 1000 other people into following Jim Jones, and the complicated reasons she stayed with him after the racially diverse, happily integrated and supportive church revealed itself to be a megalomaniac driven cult. She does such a good job painting the picture of the national emotional tenor of the 1960's and 70's, the relationships she had with her parents and friends, the mindset of a teenager, the needs human beings have for being seen and appreciated and taking part in something they believe to be special and important - that I actually found myself understanding why the People's Temple was such a strong draw for her and others. The church they joined was not a cult to their eyes, not at first - and Jim Jones really was progressive in his early messages of racial unity, and because of this he really did seem to have the answers for how people could live together and help each other positively.

Of course things eventually fall apart. Jim Jones had people signing homes and social security checks over to him. Demands on church members grew and grew. All of that still seemed necessary at first, as there were so many good works in progress and actual facilities for elderly people being erected and lived in. People kept giving of their time and work and money. Just when things reached a point in church demands where a reasonable person would start to feel resentment and question the motives of the person taking their money, Jim Jones carefully constructed a series of fake attacks that created a common enemy of the church that threatened their unity and happiness. In reality, it was Jones' theft and growing sexual abuse of church members and essentially creating an unpaid labor camp that was destroying the church, but he did such a good job constructing the visions of evil enemies standing right outside their doors, "the CIA" threatening them, an uncaring society misunderstanding them, a government jealously salivating after their financial reserves - that everyone banded even tighter together to fight side by side against these threats. This allows Jim Jones (the real enemy) to continue quietly abusing his power and his congregation, unchallenged.

The insider view of Debbie Layton is really mesmerizing. To a point, her internal reactions are so understandable that for the first time I really "got" why people end up in cults. Her story continues as she's in her 20's and moving up through the ranks, paranoia slowly intensifying in the cult until it controls everyone's every action. Her life goes from one of feeling useful and special to feeling constantly afraid for herself, her family and her life. By the time she wakes up to the realities of her situation, she's in too deep to easily run for it - everyone is a secret informant, no one can be trusted, everyone fears for their lives, Jim Jones convinces them there are armed enemies waiting for them in the bushes if they were to try to leave, plus he has literal armed guards pointing guns at cult members 'for their own safety'. The chapters where Debbie Layton plots an escape and executes it - no thanks to the bumbling, clueless American diplomats in Guyana - were so harrowing I was stressed the entire time I was listening to it.

The massacre just a few weeks after her escape is written as she imagines it. It's heartbreaking. She knew (and in the book humanized) so many of the people who drank the poison, or were injected forcibly when they tried to choose to live. The aftermath, the way she felt and was treated, the way she tried to put her life back together and the lessons she'd learned - these chapters were so necessary for this book. She ends it with some pretty powerful lessons learned and some insight into current cults (The L Ron Hubbard cult was one of Jim Jone's models for his own). It's really a fantastic, well written, well thought out account of life in a cult and the Jonestown massacre.

The narration was stunning - you can hear it in the sample, but the voice actor also does a fantastic job with different voices, accents and intonations. Her Jim Jones voice was dead on the money, I was startled to find (after watching documentaries and listening to tapes of his speeches) - whoa. Highly recommend this book.

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esto le resultó útil a 3 personas

Bad writing, stupid plot, waste of time

Revisado: 04-19-17

I can't even work up a full review. I don't know how bad writing and dumb ideas like this get published, but it's such a waste of time and effort. The 'plot' is unintelligent, boring and full of holes. The characters are unlikeable and not well fleshed out. The writing is juvenile. The narration is - well, who cares? It doesn't make the story any more enjoyable. When you see the end coming it's the dumbest possible thing - I rolled my eyes and shut it off with 20 minutes to go. It almost felt insulting to expect to invest any more time in it.

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esto le resultó útil a 13 personas

Everyone abuses Alex

Revisado: 04-01-17

So this is the third book in the Mindspace series, and I've listened to all three without giving up - so there's definitely something about these books that is listenable and interesting. This is despite the enormous, glaring plot and world-building holes, deus ex machina and characters continuously making exaggerated major actions without any discernible motivation. So even despite these huge problems, there's an underlying story that manages to be a pretty enjoyable listen.

The series centers around Alex Ward, a telepath 3 years into recovery from an intense drug addiction, presently working as a barely-tolerated consultant for the police force and shunned by the Guild of telepaths - which itself is portrayed as a shady, secretive, semi-religious and political organization that recruits and trains folks with telepathic ability and has absolute legal power over their lives and well-being.

Despite having a nearly 100% success record in his police interrogations and, as far as this series is concerned a 100% close rate in investigations of violent homicide, Adam is continuously humiliated, shamed, controlled, threatened, verbally and physically assaulted, accused, punched, kicked, bullied and insulated by his boss, coworkers, members of the Guild that raised and trained him and even by the female cop partner he's secretly in love with. Adam's employers and various other parties routinely use his powers to help them close cases, while abusing Adam viciously the entire time. I still can't figure out where this comes from. After he closes a case or saves someone's life, he's generally put on probation and threatened with losing his job and/or threatened with death and/or threatened with the death of his loved ones and/or literally punched in the face by his partner while her mind waves generate furious anger at him. Why? Who knows.

Even his former drug addiction is described as coming from a medical experiment run by the Guild, designed to improve the powers of telepaths through chemical enhancement. The medication turned out to be highly addictive, even more so for those with stronger telepathic powers, and Adam, one of the experimental subjects, was therefore immediately chemically addicted. The Guild took no responsibility for their experimentation and, after his drug use harmed some of his students, kicked him out of the Guild and stripped him of all support, assuming he'd crawl into the drug gutter and die. Shocked that he managed to kick his addiction and gain some kind of employment with the police force using his mind-reading skills to catch criminals, The Guild now hates Adam and, for reasons never spelled out, actively tries to kill him, while simultaneously using his power to help them solve their own murder cases. And then after he solves their cases for them, they again try to kill/imprison/torture him or his loved ones. Why? No idea.

Adam's telepathic powers are an ever changing grab bag of mind control, telepathy, precognition, and the ability to physically alter someone's brain. Adam is sometimes portrayed as frighteningly strong, able to put someone to sleep by "activating the sleep centers of their mind" and to kill someone with a single thought. Other times Adam is in dire straits, held captive, or watching his friends held captive, and the story forgets all those previously used abilities and he's portrayed as helpless, powerless, and unable to defend himself. I wish there were some more solid explanation for all of these odd plot choices, or some theme that tied them together.

On the plus side, the idea of a telepath/detective team can sometimes work well. The idea is good, and the bait thrown out in the last book that Adam might be consulting for the FBI is another cool idea, and I'd like to see that realized in the series (it's not in this book - the FBI like everyone else asks for Adam's help then yanks the rug out from under him) - I'm not at all sold on the romantic part of this book - it's unsexy in the extreme and just awkward and very weird. I'd like to see Adam move on in his romantic life and perhaps gain some personal empowerment, stop being everyone's punching bag and perhaps become more successful.

The narration is once again a mixed bag - I love the main narration of Adam, but the female voices are largely terrible. Luckily we have mostly Adam's voice, so it's a nice listen. I'm debating getting the next in the series.

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esto le resultó útil a 3 personas