David

Returned after an hour

Revisado: 11-29-20

It has been a few years since I read it, but as I recall, Ready Player One was a charming and fun listen, even for someone like me who is not into sci-fi, the 80’s, or gaming.

This book on the other hand feels forced. The 80s references are troweled on too thickly and the hero has become a boring, rich, navel-gazing ass. I returned it.

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An enjoyable book from outside my usual genre

Revisado: 10-08-20

Supernatural YA books are not my everyday thing, but I took a chance on this book after a friend recommended it. All in all I enjoyed it. I return a LOT of audiobooks, and I was never tempted to send this one back. I found the protagonist characters compelling and reasonably complex in that they could make ethically ambiguous decisions without undermining my interest in rooting for them to succeed.

Buying into the supernatural universe that is" just like our except for this one weird ability that some people have" was a bit of a leap for me, but it didn't have me rolling my eyes. I could accept it. Part of my brain was asking all sorts of reasonable and practical questions about how this all works, but I could tell it to shut up so I could just enjoy the story.

What could have been improved? I think there was a missed opportunity to flesh out a truly villainous force that the heroes could have been standing in opposition to. The dark side was hinted at, but it never felt truly menacing. In the end the heroes were fighting their own internal battles more than they were fighting against an external enemy. And I get it that that's a thing, and a valid thing, I just don't think it worked as well in this type of book as a truly frightening external villain would have.

Performances were solid with one exception. Accents (particularly a certain Russian accent) seemed to come and go and be emphasized more at some times than others. It seems that one character's internal dialogue was all in standard American English, but her external speaking voice had a slight accent. Which struck me as a weird choice and was hard to get used to. That particular reader/performer was quite good with the exception of the accent. The other two readers were also very good.

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esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

The Accident is a steaming pile

Revisado: 08-20-19

This was like a book written by someone who had never read an actual book but had seen a lot of movies, some of which, in the author's defense, may have had scenes in which someone was writing a book.

I made it though about an hour and it kept getting worse, but who knows, maybe it was the old literary rope-a-dope and if I had just hung in there a few more minutes it would have gotten brilliant. But I doubt it. It was dreadful in too many ways to enumerate.

On the plus side, while the recording is as weirdly echoey as other reviewers say, you really do kind of get used to it, and at any rate the audio will be the least of your afflictions if you buy this book.

Just a reminder folks, you do not have to put up with terrible books. Return them. I get the sense reading reviews that a lot of people are not availing themselves of this option. Don’t feel bad about it. And if the purchase history page tells you you’ve hit your limit on the returns (i.e., none of your books are any longer “eligible” for return), go to the help page and send them an email. They’ll refund you. I do it all the time, primarily because I take a lot of chances on daily deal books like this one. Sometimes they’re astonishingly good, but often they’re duds, although rarely as mistakenly wrought as “The Accident.”

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esto le resultó útil a 4 personas

Worse than Mitch Albom meets John Grisham

Revisado: 10-27-16

Any additional comments?

Well, gosh, it's sweet. It feels very well-intentioned. It's even somewhat compelling to read/listen to.It's all that, but Christ on a bike it's terrible. It's like one of those cheesy email chain letters you get, where someone only sees one set of footprints because God is carrying them, or where a mother whale whose baby has died nurses a little porcupine. You sort of smile, you sort of get the warm fuzzies, but it feels so fishy that you go to Snopes and find out that there is no God and that porcupines can't live in the ocean.I didn't hate it. I didn't return it, and I return a lot of bad books. I bought it as a deal of the day, and felt like I got my money's worth. It's just ham-handed in its literary style, with one-dimensional characters, and a plot without much plotting. You can tell that the author is no author. He's a retired judge trying something new, obviously with the best of intentions.The narration is fair--it feels like he's giving it his best shot, but his phrasing and intonation is straight out of one of those old Disney nature shows. It's all sincerity and ingenuousness. I've listened to him narrate other books--Bonfire of the Vanities and One Second After--and I don't remember getting that impression from them. Here he seems to be playing to the corniness of the material.Three stars, but one of them is for meaning well.

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A fantastic reading of a delightful book

Revisado: 09-26-16

Porter reads Marlowe brilliantly. I thought I would miss Humphrey Bogart, and of course I do miss Humphrey Bogart every day, but Porter takes the sting out of it, like a bottle of whiskey takes the sting out of of other kinds of missing.

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Sheesh, at least do your research...

Revisado: 09-23-16

There is a lot about this book that isn't good, but I'm going to address only the part that really annoyed me.

The book is ostensibly set in Michigan, but it's clear in several ways that the author doesn't know her setting. A few things that I noticed could fall under the heading of nitpicky (the University of Michigan doesn't have a "quad," it has a Diag; a restaurant that is said to have windows doesn't, because it's in a basement), but the final straw was when a murderer was said to have narrowly avoided the death penalty. Yeah, by like 180 years. The state of Michigan has never put anyone to death, and was in fact the first English speaking government in the world to abolish the death penalty. As Michiganians we're either proud of that fact, or outraged by it, but we're rarely ignorant of it.

Why the author decided to set the book somewhere she didn't know is something I'm curious about. It would have been a richer story if it were in a place the author had a real feeling for. I understand the need to sometimes do your research on Google street view and Yelp, but you shouldn't do the whole book that way.

As for the death penalty thing, that's just sloppy research, sloppy writing, and sloppy editing.

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Just not my thing.

Revisado: 09-29-13

Would you ever listen to anything by Steven Brust and Skyler White again?

Probably not.

Would you listen to another book narrated by Ray Porter and Mary Robinette Kowal ?

Sure. I don't think they saved the book, but they were better than the story.

You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

I liked the female character's obsession with good design, but the author's kind of let it fall by the wayside once they had used it to establish her.

Any additional comments?

This book just kind of bored me. I didn't hate it, but I stopped listening with only an hour or so to go and I never missed it. I didn't really care what happened to anyone and don't have any interest in finding out.

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esto le resultó útil a 7 personas

Not Enjoyable

Revisado: 03-23-13

Any additional comments?

I admit I only managed to get an hour into this book, but all the eye rolling was making my forehead tired. I can't quite put my finger on what the trouble was, but it felt forced. All of the vulgarity, the slang, even the Spanish phrases inserted for atmosphere gave me the impression of an author trying really hard to be cool, and just coming across as a bore.

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Insipid, Inane, and Infantile

Revisado: 02-07-13

Would you be willing to try another one of Lee Adams’s performances?

Never.

What character would you cut from Nature Girl?

The author.

Any additional comments?

This book was unlistenable. Like a bad Dave Barry column being read by a novice kindergaten teacher.

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This just made my summer!

Revisado: 08-23-12

Any additional comments?

I just downloaded this book an hour ago and haven't begun listening to it yet, but I cannot tell you how freaking excited I was to find it on Audible. Because it's the best book I have ever read, hands down, no competition.I rarely read a book more than once but I have read this one at least three times. And it's a book that cries out for an audio version because it's written in such an amazing distinctive voice. The only problem is that that voice, and the patois it speaks in, makes it a somewhat difficult read at first. A somewhat difficult listen too I gather from having read the other reviews here. But the difference is that it seems to be a lot easier to slog through a challenging listen than a challenging read. Especially when there are so many people assuring you that you just need to hang in there for a bit.I have given this book to, I think, four people. Two couldn't get past the first 20 or 30 pages and the other two absolutely loved it. If you haven't read it, consider yourself very lucky because you are about to be transported for the first time into the mind of an amazing person.I very much hope that this audio version includes the fantastic introduction by John Fowles. If it doesn't, take the time to try to find it and read it, if not before then after you listen to the book. It gives many insights into the time and place and most importantly the life of the author. I like to encourage people to read it first because otherwise they may become confused into thinking this is a genuine autobiography rather than an imagined one written by a man who left the little island when he was young and never returned.This is not a well known book, not nearly as well known as it should be, but it is a well loved book by those who have been introduced to it. If you don't believe me check the reviews of the print edition on Amazon. Only 46 reviews, but the average score is an almost unheard of 4.8 out of 5 stars.I will update this after I listen, and I apologize for the premature "Performance" review, but you can't leave it blank, apparently. If I don't care so much for it I will change that vote. The other two stand though.I feel like my team just won the Rose Bowl I am so excited about this. I can't wait to finish what I'm currently listening to. I'll have to double down on that. I called my brother and Dad right away to tell them that this book had finally been released--my brother because he loved it when he read it and is as excited as I am about the audio version, and my Dad because he couldn't make it into the book and now he'll have a chance to try again. Even though it may mean that I'll have to buy him his first MP3 player.

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esto le resultó útil a 13 personas