Silverfish

A sustaining pleasure

Revisado: 04-23-15

Where does A Child in Time rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

So far, at the top -- right up there with the later McEwans.

Have you listened to any of Simon Prebble’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

Prebble is a steady, reliable, articulate reader. He's able to give each character subtle shadings that pull the narrative forward without intruding or overacting.

Any additional comments?

Both Sweet Tooth and Child in Time take place, for the most part in a London and at a time that's familiar to me. A personal bias -- a kind of hungry homesickness for time and place and old friends -- makes the choice of five stars inevitable!

But well beyond that is admiration for McEwan's ability to write a complex story of love and loss with great intelligence and humor.

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A reader's first impresion of Sjowall/Wahloo

Revisado: 11-28-14

Is there anything you would change about this book?

I'm about an hour into my first book by these authors and have put it down to post a warning to prospective customers about the humdrum job of reading "Fire Engine" by narrator Weiner. Admittedly spoiled by the likes of Timothy West, I find it hard to get into the story read by an expressionless performer. This is phone book reading at best.

Would you be willing to try another book from Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö ? Why or why not?

Perhaps.

How could the performance have been better?

The narrator needs to feel some enjoyment in the job, get into it, have an emotion, care about the language.

Any additional comments?

In my two years (almost) of membership, Audible has increased the number of quality books in its library. Now it needs to set higher standards for its narrators as well as possibly rerecording some old favorites, using higher quality readers. Some of the current readers are so good that they spoil us. Humdrum reading seems unfair to subscribers but it must really depress first-rate authors whose writing takes a hit from a poor choice of narrator.

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Starts well, then disappoints

Revisado: 06-10-14

Any additional comments?

About halfway through the book, maybe a tad more, I decided to quit. The opening of Rascal Fair is wonderful, the writing very good, the descriptions of the journey across the Atlantic first-rate, and then descriptions of the two friends' the discovery and embrace of late 19th century Montana is lovely. As others have suggested in reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, the slow but meaty plot turns into spun sugar, a "Harlequin romance." Somewhere in Doig there's a serious writer. Not in this book.The narration is very good. A relative newcomer to Audible, I've found that the narration can make or break a book but, though Robert Ian McKenzie did a nice job, Rascal Fair is a heavy load.

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