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Maybe worth a listen, but flawed

Revisado: 02-17-22

The story was interesting for most of the book, but it was too long. too convoluted and unbelievable after a while. About half or two-thirds of the way into the book, I got bored. I ended up skipping to the last two chapters to simply know the ending, which was trite. The reader's mispronunciations didn't help. Mispronunciations always yank me right out of a story. Just two of the many words that were mangled were "nuptials" and "affluent".

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Meh

Revisado: 08-09-20

A few things...

- Renee Ballard isn't interesting.
- The narrator doesn't help.
- I am so tired of mispronunciations! (Looking at you, Lakin *and* Welliver.)
- Please, please learn to read in normal cadence, inflection, emphasis, etc. The weird pauses and stops yank me right out of the story.
- This story was, as my headline says, meh. It felt jumbled and unfocused.
- Mickey Haller, Lucia Soto, and others are far more interesting than Ballard. She's two-dimensional. Or maybe the narrator makes her so.

Okay, several things.

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Excellent

Revisado: 07-24-20

This might be my favorite Bosch book.

My only complaint is that Welliver does what's so common these days with the distracting inappropriate pauses. The narration will sound like the end of a sentence and then pick up again, in what can only be described in basic grammar rules as incomplete sentences. Connelly doesn't write that way. Another problem is that common place names are mispronounced and I wish someone would correct him so he doesn't do it in subsequent books. (For example, "lom-pock" is incorrect. It's pronounced "lom-poke".)

I really like the relationship that Bosch and Haller have and wish there'd been more of it earlier in the series.

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Well done

Revisado: 07-08-18

This has been my favorite novel for a very long time. (It's a pretty good slice of Florida in the 50s.) I like Will Patton, too, so this was a happy purchase.

My only complaints, and they are common ones for me with narrators, are the too-frequent mispronunciations and the voice characterizations. Overall, Patton does an excellent job with the characters' voices, but his voice for Dutch at SAC was just horrendous. He also mispronounces too many words, which always grates on my ear and yanks me out of the story. One of the worst was "edgars", like the name, for edgers (referring to yard tools). A couple of names were mangled, like Wechek and Hedrix. Patton says "WEH-check" instead of weecheck, and "heedrix" instead of hedrix. He also consistently mispronounced Moscow, rhyming it with low or mow instead of correctly rhyming it with cow or how. And residents of Chillicothe, Ohio, would cringe at his pronunciation.

Even with the mispronunciations, Patton did a great job. He was right with the rhythm and flow of the story, and kept the listener there with him, which is something often lacking in audiobooks. He understood the story and the people, which made for a good narration. Maybe this is the result of his decades of acting. I'll probably look for more with him as narrator.

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Overall, a no

Revisado: 07-08-18

I couldn't even finish this one. It's just filler that gets increasingly more boring as it goes along. It also gets increasingly absurd to the point that it's laughable. This would've made a great short story,

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Still love Maisie

Revisado: 05-19-18

The narrator is somewhat improved and seems to be treating Maisie a bit more like the strong and independent woman she is, and not the breathless girlie interpretation of earlier books. There’s still room for improvement, particularly with pronunciation, inappropriate pauses and odd emphases.

This story isn’t Winspear’s best but is very good, nonetheless. It’s a must for those following Maisie’s personal and professional evolution.

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Just awful

Revisado: 03-18-18

I've really tried to give this story every chance, but everything about it is just awful. The writing is adolescent and the "performance" is worse.

Mispronunciations abound and the inappropriate pauses, inflections and emphases make for a miserable listening experience. Narrators should read a story in the same way that normal conversation takes place. No one speaks like this narration. Voice performance should flow easily, not with odd pauses and weird inflections. Emphasis should be appropriate to normal conversation, not random and overdone.

Narrators who try too hard with accents always fail. Narrators who try too hard with characterizations always fail. Good writers know that a very few words are sufficient to create a character's accent. More than a few words becomes distracting (and makes the writing juvenile). Narrators need to know the same thing. All the voices and accents don't help the story and are often unintelligible. It makes for a better listening experience when the narrator uses her/his own voice with occasional and modest differences for different characters. Sixth-grade performances are all too common in audio book narration.

This narrator's voice for Rupert was laughable. She made him sound like a seventh-grader mimicking a 70-year-old phony British waiter. The Russian landlady's voice was preposterous and reminded me of a bad Boris and Natasha imitation.

The story itself should've been published as Young Adult literature (at best). It's not particularly interesting, has some glaring holes in the storyline, and is poorly written. Even the grammar and general use of language is bad. I usually notice when something is self-published, but missed it with this one. There's a reason things are self-published, and the reason is that it's not good. Some self-published books are fabulous, but they are few and far between.

This gets a complete thumbs down.

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Excellent narration

Revisado: 03-01-18

Scott Brick is just about the best reader I've listened to. He doesn't try too hard for characterizations, he doesn't mispronounce words and he doesn't pause or emphasize inappropriately.

My biggest complaint about readers is that they try way too hard when voicing characters, and it nearly always results in cartoonish voices that are often unintelligible. My next two complaints are readers who can't pronounce words correctly and who. Pause at. Inappropriate. Times. They also inevitably emphasize. THE wrong. Words.

Brick lets the characters speak for themselves, which is what all narrators should do.

The novel itself is interesting. DeMille has a way of exploring real-life events, interweaving facts, opinions and assumptions in believable and thought-provoking ways. I'd read the book many years ago and am enjoying the audio book even more.

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Spare. Me. The. Weird. Pauses.

Revisado: 02-07-18

In addition to her inappropriate pauses, Gibson’s inflection and emphasis add up to a miserable listening experience. Why do so many narrators “read” in such abysmally awful ways? Do they speak like this normally?

Moreover, her character voices are absurd. Ruby sounds like a vapid 80-year-old with a fake southern accent.

Note to narrators: It’s better not to do voices or accents at all than to do them so poorly as to be distracting. Read like you talk, not like a 4th grader trying out for the class play.

The story only gets 3 stars because I couldn’t follow it due to the poor “performance “.

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Tries too hard and doesn't try hard enough

Revisado: 10-21-17

In the case of trying too hard, some of the accents and voices are very cartoonish. McFarland's Scottish accent, for example, is too often unintelligible (and a bad Scottish accent, as well). Writers know that accents are best conveyed using altered spellings sparingly. Voice actors should know this, too, in terms of the spoken word. The other characters' voices and accents also sound silly at times. I hope the narrator tones it all down in future books because it's disconcerting and disappointing. Cartoon voices yank the listener right out of the book. These books are filled with strong characters who've had broad life experiences, making them determined and compelling, not weak, goofy and scattered. Too many voices fall in the latter description.

In the case of not trying hard enough, the narrator mispronounces far too many words. She doesn't know the difference between dudgeon and dungeon and pronounces the first as DUNGEON. She should have used the pronunciation CROOKT instead of CROOK-ED when someone crooks his finger. Bakelite isn't BAKE-LITE it's BAKE-A-LITE. Blouson isn't BOUSE-ON, it's BLOO-ZON. Waistcoat WAIST-COAT, it's WESKIT. And when a character fluent in French said AW-REV-WAHR, I cringed. The list of mispronunciations is lengthy and I hope the narrator improves with the next books in the series.

Lastly, I wish the narrator didn't characterize Maisie as a breathy, girlie woman. Maisie is strong and natural, not tee-hee girlish.

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