Bobbie

Starts strong, but the last third is a drag

Revisado: 09-07-24

After reading the weekly postings, I was very excited to listen to the full story. Sadly, the story told in the weekly postings was the best. Most of what came after was not that interesting. I felt like I was getting a boring lesson on Slavic paganism.

Additionally, the audio quality of the last third was unpleasant. Chris Brinkley uses a very gravelly voice for Roman, and while it was easy to follow in the earlier section of the book, by the last third or so, I kept having to replay a section to try and gather meaning from the gravel.

This is not one I'll be re-listening to.

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Less authentic characters would be hard to imagine

Revisado: 06-09-23

I so wanted to like this book and hoped it would be as good as The Witness. It wasn't. Though set in Vermont, it is pretty much just as if it was the family-owned Blackberry Farm resort in the Great Smoky Mountains, a place that I'm guessing Nora Roberts has visited.

The biggest issues are that Morgan's mother and grandmother are the least authentic characters in the book, and they feature in a lot of the book. Hearing Morgan continually referred to as "our girl" got as tiresome as hearing Morgan refer to her mom and grandmother as "my ladies." The too-good-to-be-true resort family was right out of a Harlequin novel. The love story wasn't terribly believable. There are no shades of gray here...every significant character is either wonderful, kind, and caring...or evil.

Where Roberts shined was in illuminating the criminal. That was good and gave me chills.

No quibbles with the narration; I think they did the best they could with the material they had.

Roberts can and has done better than this.

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Nice wrap-up to the series, but weak narration

Revisado: 01-24-23

This was a lovely ending to the series, though I wish Lowell would quit ending sentences with "said." He is a good storyteller, but this is an unnecessary weakness in his writing. Storywise, a few stumbles:
- Somehow, across five years, neither of the protagonists has any romantic relationships, and neither seems to grow much. They're pretty much the same folks we met in Milk Run.
- Zoya lacks maturity and seems to have enormously less command presence than Natalya, even though she's claimed to have much more. Her interpersonal skills are not great. She snaps at folks a lot.
- There are inconsistencies throughout the series; I suspect Lowell forgets who said/did what when.

I'm happy to see the end of Emily Woo Zeller. Her voicing of Zoya still sounds like she's auditioning to become the next voiceover artist for Dora the Explorer. Zoya sounds about 7. Natalya and the other female characters sounded fine, but the men all had gruff voices.

The book series I'd really like to see is one featuring Dr. Margaret Stevens.

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Good idea, weak writing

Revisado: 12-16-22

The story idea is a good one, but Veronica Scott is not adept at writing dialogue or letting the characters show their characteristics rather than telling us directly. And, having met a few special forces folks, pretty much the last thing they do is brag about being special forces.

More annoyingly, the women are lacking in agency and independence. Romance springs up out of nowhere, and the characters fail to develop over the course of the story.

The narration by Michael Riffle had some weird pauses and pacing, but I'll give him a pass since I would have taken time away for drink or two trying to get through narrating this book's dialogue.

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Really great story told really really slowly

Revisado: 09-24-22

The fundamental story here is great, but it is a novella stretched into an interminable novel.

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Good story but the narrator is incompetent

Revisado: 09-03-22

This was a good story sadly diminished by the incompetent narration of Cynthia Holloway. Holloway mispronounces numerous words and doesn't do a good job of providing different voices.

I hope Elizabeth Moon finds a better narrator down the line.

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The narrator is angry ALL THE TIME

Revisado: 05-20-22

A decent story was ruined for me by a narrator (Alexandra Harris) who spits out each word like she's shooting bullets from a machine gun. Everything she says sounds angry. She also mispronounces numerous words and has real trouble creating different voices.

There are so many points of view represented in the book that it isn't always easy to keep track of the sequence of events.

If there is a subsequent book in the Lake Silence series, I'll choose to read it rather than listen to Alexandra Harris again.

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Narrator makes Zoya sound like Dora the Explorer

Revisado: 11-04-21

Good story - very good story, but narrator Emily Woo Zeller is awful. Natalia sounds fine, but Zoya sounds like a six-year-old Dora the Explorer. All that's missing is the monkey. She also is ineffective at voicing a lot of the men. It really detracted from the story.

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Great story, lots of backstory

Revisado: 03-25-21

I really enjoyed this story and was surprised at the turn it took in the last third of the book. Fascinating backstory, and more redemption of a character whose backstory we've gotten hints of before. And the epilogue was truly a surprise.

Holter Graham isn't a fabulous narrator. I never understood why the choice was made to use a male narrator for a series that focused on Anna. Graham is not the best at differentiating the secondary voices.

Altogether a very enjoyable book. I'll listen to it again.

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No humor, very routine

Revisado: 01-29-21

This is the first Susan Elizabeth Phillips book that I'm certain I will not re-read/re-listen. It is trite, lacks the great dialogue and character development of her earlier books. It is like a color-by-number version of her writing.

Worse, the protagonist is not just flawed, but unlikeable. I wouldn't have trusted her with a baby - she was crazed. And Ian North was pretty much a cardboard character.

I'll probably try her next book by borrowing it from the library. She used to be an auto-buy, but no more. Sad, because the Chicago Stars books were great.

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