Carolyn

Frustrating Narration; Annoying Protagonist

Revisado: 09-23-24

I have never returned a book to Audible before, even when I didn’t like it, but I got 10% into this one and I had to give up. I should have listened to the sample before buying; the narration is so bad. It is heavily Texas-accented, which might not have been a problem except that there is no audible distinction between out-loud dialogue, internal dialogue (which the main character does a lot), and exposition. I get that it’s in the first person, so it’s all being told in her “voice”, but it was so confusing to listen to. I kept needing to rewind, trying to figure out whether something was said out loud or not. If the narrator had saved the heavier accent for out-loud dialogue and made it more neutral for the exposition and internal dialogue, it would have been so much easier to follow. And it would have made the accent charming and character-appropriate instead of distracting.

Plot-wise, I got tired of the main character’s constant mooning over the love interest very quickly. I don’t read a rom-com with a fake relationship trope to hear that one of the characters is already obsessed with the other from Chapter One. It feels unbalanced and kind of desperate, and it loses the charm of watching two people as they fall in love accidentally. And introducing the love interest as a drunken idiot was… a choice. It made her being ridiculously into him even more unbelievable. If I were her friend, I’d encourage her to get over him, not have a happily-ever-after with him.

This is a small thing, but I didn’t understand why there were random quotes at the beginning of each chapter. They seemed irrelevant, and it just served to remind me that the narrator could have been reading more of the content in a more scaled-back accent to distinguish dialogue from exposition, but chose not to.

I’m not willing to give a book I didn’t finish one star, since who knows; it might get better. But if I’m not interested in finding that out after four chapters and over an hour of listening, I don’t have high hopes.

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Too Much; Needed Editing

Revisado: 09-15-24

The best way I can describe this book is “too much”. The excessive exposition and info dumping that constantly interrupts the story in the first two chapters was so “too much” that it almost made me quit listening then.

Then the descriptions were just “too much”. It felt like a creative writing exercise, to spend a long paragraph explaining the tiny visual details (and often very specific smells, for some reason) of every new setting the characters are in. (Also, I am a married middle-aged woman who has no problem with spice in a rom-com, but ugh, something about the descriptions of the kissing specifically were detailed to the point of not being hot anymore and grossing me out instead. It was so bad that I literally said “ew” out loud by the third time it happened!) So many unnecessary details in the text that were extra distracting in the audiobook format because they interrupted the action and had no real purpose.

The side characters were also “too much”. I liked the Aunties and thought they made sense as side characters, but did we really need detailed traumatic background info on coworkers who only appear in like two scenes? Did there need to be half a dozen Irish great-aunts and great-uncles with info-dump backstories who barely have three lines of dialogue? I don’t mind doing some world-building, but when you can’t keep track of all the side characters because 90% of them are just window dressing and make no contributions to the plot, edit some of them out!

I don’t have high expectations for a rom-com, and I’m willing to put up with a bit of melodrama. But there were too many melodramas going on at once in this book. The will. The fake relationship (which, BTW, way too many people knew was fake to be convincing to the people who needed to believe it, even in suspend-disbelief rom-com land). The “dating plan”. The startup. The distillery. The prom. The reason he wasn’t at the prom. Her mother. His mother. His father. His brother. Her brother. It was already ridiculous, so, when with 3 hours to go they added one more giant, surprise melodrama worthy of a daytime soap opera to the list (no spoilers, but it’s jarring), it was finally “too much” for me. I couldn’t take it anymore. I stopped listening and I want the other eight hours of my life back.

I didn’t hate all of the book. I thought the Indian family was great, a believable and likeable bunch with realistic quirks, but I cringed a lot at the stereotypes when they focused a lot on how the family with the whiskey business and the violent alcoholic were Irish. I liked Liam as a character; Daisy not so much. Her behaviour and personality weren’t very consistent, and for the first half of the book especially she was kind of unlikeable and confusing. She grew on me a bit over time, but he was still by far the more likeable and believable character. I thought lots of the tropes were fun, even when they were predictable, and some of the banter was genuinely funny. But overall? This book was so disappointing.

(And yes, it was super annoying to base a whole chapter on “halftime at a hockey game” when watching literally only one hockey game would have been sufficient research to learn that hockey is divided into three periods and therefore doesn’t have a “halftime”. That is basic stuff. I don’t even watch pro sports and I know that.)

The narration was excellent, but good narration can’t save a book that desperately needed more editing.

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Enjoyable and Satisfying Beyond My Expectations

Revisado: 04-02-24

I am going to start this review with this: I almost never listen to fiction (I am mostly a very-dense-nonfiction reader), and when I do choose a fiction book, I often get annoyed with it and DNF. Not this time!

This book was like a breath of fresh air. Characters that have depth and realism, imperfect like all of us but who are also genuinely likeable. A two-narrator format that actually works, that even makes you look forward to the next chapter so you can get the other person’s perspective on what’s currently happening. Secondary characters who aren’t stereotypes or caricatures, but rather realistic people who feel like they have stories of their own going on behind the scenes. The relationship buildup is so frustratingly gradual, but in a good way, like there’s no rush to get to where all books like this tend to end, so the author wants you to enjoy the journey to get there just as much as the final destination. And absolutely no romanticizing toxic behaviour (just the opposite, in fact) or shock-value traumatic surprises (I hate books that do that).

I didn’t listen to the half-hour interview with the author at the end of the book (I just don’t personally like any sort of meta, book-club-discussion lit-analysis stuff, to be honest, so I turned it off), so I can’t comment on that. Mostly I was annoyed that it wasn’t another epilogue — I would have loved to hear the same day from Leon’s perspective after Tiffy’s version was done — but that’s my only complaint about the audiobook.

Honestly, the amount I enjoyed this book was a huge surprise for me — it was a really wonderful story that was very hard to pause, even when I needed to charge my headphones in order to listen more. Five stars are well-deserved!

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Thorough and Interesting Look at Driving Behaviour

Revisado: 12-20-17

This book covers a significant amount of detail about driving behaviour and traffic outcomes from that behaviour. It is more about human behaviour and psychology than traffic engineering and it takes a wide, international view on approaches to solving traffic problems, including considerable historical context. I found it very interesting, with a wide range of topics and well-researched answers to questions about how to be safe on the road, including input from many experts in the field. It presents safety data without being preachy, and it maintains the relatable style of a non-expert while providing the largely non-judgmental approach of a sociologist.

This book was engaging to listen to despite the amount of statistics and numbers involved. Although the conversational, personal style of the author helps provide that feel, the narration also was well-done and contributed to keeping me listening for extended periods at a time.

Overall, this book is thorough in its depth and a good mix of reinforcement of common sense and surprising results of studies on driving behaviour. It is a little dated on its discussion of self-driving cars, which have become significantly more sophisticated since the book was written, but otherwise it is relevant and modern. I would recommend it to anyone interested in human behaviour, especially if, like me, you listen to audiobooks while sitting in stop-and-go gridlock on your commute every day.

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Interesting, but not excellent

Revisado: 11-20-17

This book is a description of the outbreak of epidemic encephalitis in the 1920s. I knew very little about it before reading the book and it was a fascinating story. It really is a forgotten disease that should be remembered like polio or pandemic flu, considering the severe effects its survivors lived with for the rest of their lives - Parkinson’s disease, psychosis, paralysis, etc. - but it is not. And I do feel that the book did a good job conveying the importance of the disease and the effects it had on people’s lives. It also made sure the story was relatable and human, not just dry, impersonal facts, by including detailed descriptions of the personalities and backgrounds of important characters such as researchers, case studies, and family members.

However, the book’s style was a little strange. It strayed from its otherwise historical and medically accurate tone to make up weird, unnecessarily flowery descriptions about, say, the path a particular researcher took to work. Other personal details of major characters were drawn from correspondence and other real documentation, which made those completely fictional passages stick out even more. It also talked a lot about the city of New York without always having a really clear reason why that was relevant to the narrative, such as a long and detailed description of the overhauling of Central Park in the 1930s. Those parts seemed like filler and rather than enhancing the book, they were just a distraction from what I really wanted to find out: what we know about the disease today. That answer, however, was bizarrely rushed and lacked detail, which was a letdown compared to the slow, tangent-laden pace of the rest of the book.

The narration was good, if not outstanding. I gave it four stars.

Overall, I gave this book three stars. The content when it was on-topic was very interesting and the subject was presented with a good balance of sympathetic humanity and scrupulously accurate facts. However, the author’s style of long, loosely-connected tangents detracted from the overall impact. I wouldn’t listen to it again because by the end I was finding that part of the book very irritating - and then the ending wasn’t even satisfying or worth the wait.

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A Little Clinical, But Good

Revisado: 11-15-17

This book tells a number of stories about compulsive hoarders, separated by a lot of clinical discussions of the behaviour. I found it to be kind, fair, and deliberate in its avoidance of over-sensationalized reality-tv-style depictions of these people, who are instead portrayed as creative, intelligent, sensitive, and often badly misunderstood (and mistreated) by the rest of society. It was a professional and refreshing take on the phenomenon of hoarding.

Although I enjoyed the book, it was too detached and clinical for a popular psychology book in my opinion. Hearing about the people was interesting, and some of the discussion of causes of hoarding, treatments, etc. was worth reading, but it was not personal enough for me to feel invested in the hoarders’ lives (likely due to the professional detachment of the authors) and too much of it was about things like how to categorize hoarding in the DSM and other minutiae that not many average readers would care about.

The narration was very good. It was easy to listen to and added to the experience of reading the book.

Overall, I gave the book four stars. It was definitely insightful, respectful, and interesting; I just found it was not always focused on the aspects of the topic most likely to engage an average person reading the book.

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Great Stories for Adults

Revisado: 11-06-17

Stories about women are always a low priority in the study of history, even stories about women with high visibility and social status. Stories about women that avoid both demonizing them and romanticizing them excessively are even rarer. This book is an excellent collection of stories about women that could be considered “princesses”, regardless of the historical importance of that princess. The book tells interesting tales about princesses who led armies or who ruled empires as well as princesses who went broke or went crazy, all of which are treated factually as much as possible (with some editorializing that is a little contrived, but overall the narratives are well-written). The stories are diverse and engaging, and although I read a lot of history books, many of the women featured were people I’d never heard of. The book makes an effort to focus on human stories of more obscure women, regardless of their accomplishments or flaws, which makes it truly unique. The author tries to offer non-European “princesses”, and generally does that well, though it is still pretty Euro-centric.

Although the introduction does talk about the need to contradict the Disney Princess idea with the reality of what a princess really is, do not make the mistake of thinking that this is a good book to read your princess-obsessed seven-year-old. The book deals in the realities of royal life and does not avoid discussing sex and violence (neither are excessively graphic but they are present). Not many of the stories would be age-appropriate to share with a kid under 12.

The narration in this book was excellent; one of the best I’ve heard, even with all the non-English names and places.

Overall, this was neither a repetitive nor a dull book about royalty. It provides an important perspective on historical women that makes them real and tangible as people rather than paragons of virtue or symbols of evil temptation. It is definitely worth the read and the other dimension it provides to traditional historical narratives about women in generally and princesses specifically.

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Fluffy but Useful

Revisado: 04-20-16

This is not an ask-an-expert parenting book. Janet Lansbury is a sort-of-used-to-be-famous disciple of Magda Gerber, an infant development expert who died in 2007. Lansbury doesn't claim to be an expert, but she is a wholehearted believer in the RIE approach to respectful parenting and has years of experience teaching this method to other parents. This book is almost entirely about infants and toddlers, not older children.

In principle, RIE is about respecting children from birth as whole people and letting them develop and learn on their own terms and in their own time. I agree with this principle, but, like any parenting ideology, it inevitably gets taken too far, like when Lansbury is very critical of parents asking toddlers harmless questions like, "Where's your nose?" because, apparently, that creates performance anxiety...? And although it's nice in theory to ask an infant's permission to change their diaper, it's a little much to expect parents to never need to get through a diaper change with an active nine-month-old without a distraction like a toy or a song, or to constantly tell a newborn everything that is about to happen at all times. I also don't believe in never explicitly teaching children things. If you don't expose them to something, how are they supposed to know whether or not it interests them? The book also tells you to ignore your parenting instincts in favour of doing everything the RIE approach tells you, which in my opinion is more likely to make parents feel insecure and not genuine than it is to help them make good decisions for their kids.

That said, the majority of the advice is useful if you can manage to not take the sanctimonious parts too seriously. Messages for parents like "take care of yourself", "it's okay to let kids be frustrated", "you don't need to entertain your baby", and "boundaries are important and necessary, not mean" are all good and helpful things for parents to hear. Is some of it contrived? Sure. But the overall message is reassuring and surprisingly realistic. Your baby needs the freedom to explore, and it is completely reasonable to restrict their play areas with gates/fences/etc. to keep them safe. The vast majority of babies will roll, sit up, walk, talk, and toilet-train in their own time and focusing on median-based milestone timing is a recipe for unnecessary parent anxiety. Your baby doesn't need to be attached to you 24/7 to feel secure. Your toddler will thrive in a world with limits and natural consequences. Hovering and constantly intervening is not helpful and often actively undermines kids who are trying to develop social skills or learning to solve problems. Kids are happiest with simple toys and a safe play environment - they don't need noisy, over-complicated "educational" toys or fancy music classes to learn and grow. Take your cues from your child when making decisions about everything from mealtimes to conflicts with other children and don't rely on tricks or manipulative tactics to make them do what you want.

Lansbury, perhaps because she used to be an actor, is a very good narrator. Unlike many books read by the author, this one felt comfortable and natural.

I can't give this book five stars. It's definitely above average for a parenting book, but still a little judgmental and often not based on actual developmental science. However, it was much better than I expected and would be worth listening to again in the future.

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Useful Tools; Impratical and Contrived Pet Theory

Revisado: 04-15-16

I really enjoyed the first half of this book. The concept of using neuroscience to help make good parenting choices was attractive to me and as a parenting book this is not a preachy, judgmental, or excessively ideological one. It emphasizes twelve strategies for helping kids develop good mental health maintenance and self-reflection skills that are related to integrating the various parts of the brain together so kids can learn to make good choices, manage big emotions, process difficult experiences, and overall feel in control of their thoughts and state of mind. The tools they provide are practical and are designed to complement other parenting strategies, not become the One True Parenting Way as is presented by many books on how to raise a well-rounded child.

While I liked and agreed with the integration aspects of the book, and to some extent with the implicit/explicit memory sections, once the topic turned to the authors' pet theory, called "mindsight", I found it much less credible. The metaphor of the bicycle wheel gets stretched pretty far, and despite being a pretty introspective person, I honestly found it hard to follow or visualize. It seems much better suited to use in formal therapy, if it works for the patient, rather than in parenting. How many parents are going to be able to rattle off a long guided visualization about the rim and the spokes and the hub and choosing different rim points... it was too complicated and too contrived to be useful. Unlike the rest of the book, which gave much more believable exchanges between parents and kids, the mindsight-related topics sounded contrived and the examples were from one author's therapy experiences, not from parenting moments, which is telling. I also felt like the message of "you can choose to feel differently/think about other things and that will solve your problems!" message to be not just unrealistic, but also potentially harmful for a young person struggling with a more serious mental health issue.

This audiobook is narrated by the authors. They are competent narrators, if a little slow-paced for my taste.

Four stars might be too generous but it is so much better than the average parenting book that I can ignore the less realistic parts and take away the most useful tools, which are good enough to make it worth rounding up in my opinion.

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Totally Fascinating

Revisado: 08-24-15

This book was excellent. It was detailed enough to interest someone who knew some about rabies beforehand, yet clearly presented so anyone could follow and understand it. It did have some gory details, but they weren't such a focus that the gross-out factor overshadowed the story. Although it is informative about a serious subject, it also does a good job of telling a series of stories. The development of the vaccine was a particularly great one, but the historical perspectives on cases and the modern medical story of the rabies survivor were also very interesting. I found the pop culture angle sort of thin, but the rest of it was much more substantial and engrossing.

There is something about the narrator that I don't like, but I can't quite put my finger on it. It may just be that he narrated another audiobook I didn't enjoy, but it wasn't exceptional.

Overall, I would highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys popular science writing, medical nonfiction, or social/cultural histories. It would appeal to a much larger audience than it may appear at first glance.

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