TiffanyD

Cute British Mystery

Revisado: 02-13-25

If you are looking for an easygoing mystery with lots of British countryside and charming characters, you could do much worse. Nothing will blow your socks off (the identity of the villain is revealed gradually rather than dramatically) but it's a very pleasant listen with an excellent narrator.

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Cozy Christmas but ultimately unsatisfying

Revisado: 01-27-25

When December rolls around I start yearning for a cozy Christmas mystery so I was willing to give this series a try (this is one of I think two Christmas mysteries in this series). On the one hand, the narration is way better than in The Knife Before Christmas. But the story is pretty silly, with way too many side plots. The mystery element ultimately just isn't that satisfying. And super funny--this audio book was apparently not carefully edited. There are three separate moments where a character's name is pronounced one way, and then the narrator immediately rereads the same sentence, pronouncing the same name in a different way. The original mispronunciation is just left in. I guess no proof-listeners were employed.

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Terrible rendition of a ludicrous story

Revisado: 01-20-25

Just a terrible reading of a hot mess of a story. The audio quality is bad and seems to have not been edited. As in sometimes the narrator stops mid sentence and then restarts. Is this in the public domain and is this a volunteer recording? The narrator has no idea how to pronounce basic Mexican-Spanish words. Jefe is pronounced "Jeff" and "serape" rhymes with "wrap." And the story is just ludicrous with lots of back and forth about the blood of the Mexican vs the blood of the European, and then D.H. Lawrence's fun proclamations on the nature of women. But when he referred to "phallic wind" I was like, come on, man! That's just self parody!

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Virtual Voice still has a way to go

Revisado: 06-09-24

Mispronunciations and awkward pauses didn't make for the smoothest listen. I think professional book narrators still have some job security.

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No accompanying PDF

Revisado: 06-19-23

I mostly enjoyed (although was frequently dismayed by) this exploration of some of the right-wing culture currently infecting the USA. Not sure I really "got" the point of the bookend chapters involving Harry Belafonte and Lee Hays but the middle was quite interesting.

However, the introduction states that a PDF is available an accompaniment to the title and the narrator/author mentions an accompanying PDF multiple times. Such a PDF is not included and when I contacted Audible customer support about this, they demanded time stamps of where the narrator mentions this and then basically asked if I knew how to open a pdf. Um...yeah. There is no pdf accompanying this.

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Missing a Chapter! Otherwise Excellent

Revisado: 02-10-23

First things first: towards the end you get the following chapters in the following order: 34-37-36-37. So chapter 35 is missing and chapter 37 is repeated. I don't know what is contained in that chapter but as it is only one chapter, I feel confident in recommending the book. It doesn't matter if you love or hate GWTW, and have or have not seen the movie or read the book. This is a book about America, the myths and the lies and the ugly truths.

One quibble and one trigger warning: The author refers to the death of George Floyd as part of a routine traffic stop. That's not actually what happened and given the prominence of his story it seems like either the author or the editor certainly should have caught that. The trigger warning is for the graphic descriptions of lynchings. I understand why they are there but they are brutal and that they are meant to upset us and make us see the truth. But if you are sensitive to violence, or if someone in your family was ever victimized by this kind of violence, it might be too much.

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Flaw in audio; other wise good

Revisado: 01-14-23

So in chapter 18 or 19 the audio cuts off in the middle of the sentence. I downloaded onto a second device to make sure it wasn't an issue with the original download. It was not. So that's annoying for perfectionists but it's only one sentence and if you have the text handy, you can just read the end of the sentence.

There's not much of a plot. Just a play taking place at an English country house during a day where rain is threatened. But there are little human dramas that play out in between. This lack of plot meant it took me a rather long time to listen considering how short it is. Nothing really compelled me forward. But it's well narrated and if you like Virginia Woolf, you will definitely like this.

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Great storytelling; distracting pronunciations

Revisado: 12-17-22

Really great science story telling and mostly read competently by the narrator but with a few pronunciation issues. Another reviewer mentioned this and while I heard a few issues early in the book, when the SARS chapters came up it was super annoying. The city name of Guangzhou is pronounced often and always incorrectly. I even asked a Cantonese speaking friend how they pronounce it in Cantonese to see if maybe he was actually pronouncing it the right way in that language. Nope. Wrong in Mandarin, wrong in Cantonese, wrong in English.

But once those chapters were over, it was back to great story telling about the science of diseases. Except towards the end, where I found it dragged a bit when the author went into a lot of imagining about how HIV might have originated with a specific person who had some ivory to trade...lots of imagination, less of the science that made the rest of the book interesting.

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Easy listening about early 20th Century China

Revisado: 11-26-22

Twelve individual stories in easy to digest chunks. Lots of focus on Shanghai and its large and varied ex-pat community but with some additional cases from Hong Kong, Yunnan, and other places. I wish there was an accompanying pdf because some of the cases I would have liked to google more on my own, but even with a basic knowledge of how Chinese words/names are translated into the Roman alphabet, I couldn't always catch the names and places. Someone with zero knowledge of Mandarin would have an even harder time.

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Compelling

Revisado: 11-12-22

I suspect like many Americans, I have very little knowledge of the life and times of the Trujillo dictatorship and the United States' own involvement in his crimes. So I cannot speak to the historical accuracy of this novel. However, I found this fictionalized version very compelling. It slowed down a little bit for me towards the end but for the first three quarters or so, I was completely in its grip. The narrators were great and the language seemed very smooth, as I would expect from an Edith Grossman translation. Definitely feel like I need to learn more about the Dominican Republic.

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