Amazonian by default

Great "freebie"

Revisado: 11-21-22

This is a great listen that comes with the membership. Enjoyable intermission between books. Thought provoking.

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Eastender narration destroys classic fantasy

Revisado: 11-21-22

Everything character sounds like a "peasant;" even the narration. Everyone sounds like "Eastenders." It seems like many British audio book narrations suffer from this, today.

I bought both collections prior to release, but waited until now to listen. I was in my mid-teens in the late 70's when I discovered this influential saga and wanted others to hear the book, but friends and family cannot maintain interest in this fantastic tale, because the narration is bad. I agree with all of the criticism of other reviews, here.

It's also kind of a ripoff because the Corum series was a full-production multicast affair with a sprinkling of sound effects and music, where as this is just one guy with many highly inappropriate and contradictory characterizations. I was expecting Corum quality, even though it also suffered from bad casting. Corum sounded like an Irish country bumpkin.

I doubt Moorcock had any tangible involvement in this. This is simply more damage to his legacy. And btw, quit letting Neil Gaiman impose himself into every facet of Northwestern European myth and fantasy. It's further ruination and degradation of our culture. I skipped the alleged depravity forced on unsuspecting decent and morally upright people, but this is a deeply shameful disgrace that cannot go unanswered. It's another contribution to the ongoing racist holocaust working to end the existence of the race that created every aspect that made this audio book possible; from the author, to the books, to the language, the technology, Amazon, Audible, etc., etc. This holocaust is the most heinous act in human history, and anyone partipating in it should be held legally and morally accountable.

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Nice ending

Revisado: 12-26-21

The first part is an unpleasant tale of child neglect and abuse, fitting the HP pattern. The rest is mostly conveying guilt, fear, and the type of oppression currently occurring in the UK.

This story may cause children to obsess over discarding or misplacing any manufatured object; even scrap paper. As told in this tale, a huge variety of lost objects are sent to a hell where, after years of suffering brutality and fear, they are eventually murdered by a monster. Cruel treatment and death are punishments for a lost broken toy, for example, if a child fails to care about it. If the child continues to obsess about a lost broken toy, the object (becoming fully animated upon being lost) is rewarded with a life of luxury.

The last part of the story was nice. The presentation was good.

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No Santa Claus, no holiday theme nor spirit

Revisado: 12-18-21

This isn't a Christmas tale. This manages to employ vague reflections of Christmas icons into a sci-fi plot seemingly hatched by a child of ten or eleven. The plot falls as flat as the humor. After listening to about two-thirds of the first book, my aversion had reached a crescendo; mainly because this utterly lacks anything of a Christmas nature.

From a literary perspective, the writting was poor to amatuerish. There are no writing standards with Amazon publishing, and this is an excellent example of this. The positive reviews are aligned with the evident collapse of all standards and indicators of higher civilization, which any intelligent and honest individual descended from European Civilization can attest to.

The narration alone would have ruined the story, even if it had been worth listening to. For me, the worst aspect of this was that every character had a New York or Boston-type accent, including the "elves."

You can read other unfavorable reviews describing the unpleasant specifics of this half-baked story, and I concur with those. I found the entire offering to be verging on the scatological. Fortunately, my membership allows for easy returns.

In conclusion, this author seemingly borrows elements associated with Christmas, but strips these of "Christmas," itself. This is not a Christmas tale. This is an amateurish sci-fi with quasi-Christmas references. The Christmas trappings are merely implied. There is no Santa Clause, here. This is not a Santa Claus origin story. Magic has been replaced with unconvincing sci-fi "science," and this is made clear in the story. There is definitely no holiday spirit or theme, and that is the most disappointing factor. In light of this, I find this book misleading, in addition to having a childish plot, having poor literary quality, being in bad taste, and having unacceptable narration.

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Relieved it's over

Revisado: 06-03-21

This series started out fair. With the second book, the protagonist radically changed. He went from being a ruthless and powerful survivor to being a character perpetually nagged by regrets and doubts.

For most of the series, the cover depicted a wolf cub, even though he was essentially an adult by the end of the first book. Thus ironically, some of the characters had baby voices throughout years of events. In the second book, characters who were young adults were later given todler voices. Young characters were inappropriately given todler voices that never changed, and a few regressed with age. (Also, I think we are all sick of readers who run out of character voices and use a hack foreign accent, even though the book has said nothing to indicate that they should have for example, a Russian or French accent. That's highly unprofessional.)

Like so many in the book writing field, I think the author started this series and got bored with it. She started another series that became more interesting for her. The unfinished series got "phoned in." I was hooked by the tough-guy character, but strung along after that.

These books are really short and lack quality substance. One credit should suffice for the entire series.

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Might work for small children

Revisado: 12-22-19

One dimensional. Stories quickly became insipid and ridiculous. May be ok for small kids, but deals with death and mortality.

The narration was irksome. One character had a kooky East Indian voice in the middle of a European-folklore-based fantasy setting. The children's voices were all "1940's-style baby-voices." The reading was glib and insipid, like the book.

This book is completely independent from the Oz stories.

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Very scant action for an action novel

Revisado: 06-25-19

I bought this novel because the geographic locations in the story were of personal interest to me. Unfortunately, Gardner did not live up to the travelogue standards of Ian Fleming.

In this book, we have an alternate-universe continuation tale where a WW2 veteran, James Bond, seems to be three decades younger than he should be (I think this is set in 1989), and his WW1 officer boss, "M," who should be about one-hundred years old, is now also a globetrotter, flying around the world to act as James Bond's onsite supervisor, bail bondsman, and annoying old uncle.

However, true to life, Simon Vance/Robert Whitfield, the narrator, does sound older than in the original audio books he narrated decades ago. (Sorry, Amazon, but I'm not quite convinced that "audio book" is one word, although you have single-handedly changed the English language to make it so, through sheer dominance.) One of the most irritating aspects of this book is Vance's heavy-handed thick Chinese accents for second and third generation Chinese people born and raised in America. People usually have little to no foreign accent under these conditions. Chinese people fresh off the plane do not have the stilted accents that an American born naval officer has in his narration. This adds to the overall "corniness" of a pretty silly book. (I saw an interview online where Vance describes Ian Fleming's writing as racist and misogynistic, and therefore offensive. In the oppressive atmosphere of 2019, perhaps people should save digital copies of these novels before the paper versions are burned, along with the hardcopy owners of these.)

The titular villain is a combination of Fleming's Mr. Big from "Live and Let Die," and Dr. No. The similarities are too numerous to list here, and that is particularly true of Dr. No. Do not, under any circumstance, read or listen to "Dr. No" immediately before listening to this audio book. I have been subjecting my wife to the Fleming audio books, and by accident this is what I did. This makes Brokenclaw's obvious clone-job particularly nauseating.

This book has even less action than "Casino Royale," the novel. There was a small amount of action in the beginning, then Bond sits aboard a USN ship for about eight or nine chapters, doing absolutely nothing other than engaging with the overblown dialogs of superfluous characters. For the bulk of this book, nothing happens. During Bond's stay on the ship, a Bond-less side story takes place, but not much happens in that, either. When things finally pick up again for the final few chapters, weird and illogical things take place. This book was one of the weakest action novels I've ever read. I don't always consume fiction for its face value, but I do hope for better than this, even when my interest isn't obvious.

I have only read (or listened to) a few non-Fleming Bond books. Having read all of the Fleming 007 novels in the 5th and 6th grades (the first time; in the mid-nineteen seventies), I would say one redeeming facet of this paperback novel was that it did not dwell on sexual descriptions of Bond's carefree amoral behavior. Fleming's creepy attempts at eroticism were extraordinarily cringeworthy. However, in "Brokenclaw," there was a bizarre moment when the villain thoroughly rubbed Bond's "loins" with grease so that pet wolves would devour his genitals. No, I am not making this up. I'm not sure what part of the author's psychology projected this onto paper, nor why this passed an editor's "smell test," but this would get my vote as the strangest episode in 007 history, if I counted this displeasing book as cannon, which I certainly do not.

I cannot recommend this book. The only other redeeming facets of this story is that James Bond has significantly curbed his alcoholism (I imagine his aged and highly abused liver can't handle more than a few sips of the product placed Californian vino) and he has quit smoking (tobacco). Good for you, Mr. Bond! Oh, and he has also inexplicably given up coffee for tea (again, I suspect his elderly digestive system has revolted), despite his office outburst about tea vs. coffee in an original Fleming novel. Perhaps it was even herbal tea. An elderly gentleman stretching himself to the limits of human physical function must make occasional concessions, even if it he is the notorious, I mean legendary, James Bond.

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Foolish, arrogant, and highly ignorant

Revisado: 05-07-19

There are no truths here, merely arrogant and contradictory conjectures. Magic does not spring from the brain, and this is one of the human brain's most grotesque examples of this that I have witnessed. The complete ignorance of this work is delivered with breathtaking pretentiousness. This book is not even a "work;" it is the narcissistic ramblings of a fool pretending to be knowledgeable and enlightened. At first I laughed at the most obviously ridiculous and intellectually amateurish spewings. In the end, one's intelligence can only endure so much self-torture by voluntarily submitting itself to the most unenlightened and self-important nonsense about metaphysics since the syphilitic death of Aleister Crowley.

The narration here does not match well with the material. The material is that of a foppish Frenchmen with an affected and extremely pretentious posture as a grand old sage. The voice here is of a "New Jersey" car salesman or insurance agent. This voice would be ok for a local Northeastern commercial, but this is not the voice of a pretender who wants to pretentiously convince the world that he knows all of life's great mysteries and holds the keys to magical powers; not by a very long shot.

You will never obtain the answers to life's mysteries nor gain supernatural powers by reading a book. This is a boyhood dream that began with the invention of the book. Before books, ignorant men thought some object could convey this. The daydream is: something will give you power and wisdom that you obviously cannot obtain with what you already possess. You will never gain this unless you were ordained to recieve this, and at that point it will be a mature burden, and not at all like your childish fantasies imagine it to be. You may reach a certain level of enlightenment by many lifetimes of proper application; but you will never get this from a book, a magic oil lamp, a ring, divination paraphernalia, a magical personage, nor a religion.

If you do obtain privileged wisdom, you may occasionally want to read books to see if anyone else exists or has existed at your tier of understanding and being, and has written about it. If so, you will find that to essentially be a dead end, but you may find lesser exceptions. This book will never come close to being one of those lesser exceptions.

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Nice and long smogasbord of weird stories

Revisado: 10-20-17

When traveling alone, these make great bedtime stories to fall asleep to. Yes, imagine that, fairy tales make good bedtime stories! These stories are really bizarre; sometimes a little disturbing, sometimes pretty silly, but always weird.

Someone here was complaining that these are "Christianized." Well, so was "Beowulf." Most of Norse mythology (the Sagas and Eddas) and Germanic mythology were written by Christians and are highly contaminated in many peoples' estimate. Unless you can go back in time about 1200 years or more and collect the stories yourself, you are stuck with this, so complaining here about Christian contamination is unproductive. Unfortunately, Germanic pagans wrote almost nothing of their religious and folk beliefs. The Christian references in this collection are very sparse, and with very few exceptions are completely incidental and inconsequential.

Someone claims these are "English" and therefore not authentically Norse. I do not believe this to be the case. Just because England is mentioned in a very few stories does not mean these are English. Also, no one has the authority to dismiss anything from England's Danish settlement period (such as Beowulf) as not qualifying as Norse. That is not the case, and so one questions the motive for suggesting this? Perhaps such a person needs to learn Norwegian and see if they can find a Norwegian folktale book, if England and English bothers them. At best, they would probably only find an uncredited modern translation of this vintage book.

When I am journeying in wild forested and rocky places, this book is excellent to turn to at night, as a sleep aid. It is long, and has numerous short stories. I can put this book down for months, and come back to it when I return to my wilderness vacations. It has stories of trolls, witches, magic, and other uniquely strange subjects presented in an odd fashion, by modern standards. I have been listening to this on and off for several years. This audio book never fails to hold my interest enough to eliminate stray thoughts, but is light enough that I will fall asleep before the timer stops the audio. I derive satisfaction from knowing that it has an almost pure ancestral aesthetic, and that it lacks the crudeness, political correctness, and smothering satire that permeates our modern anti-culture.

Tip: If you are alone, try a compact, $20 plug-in speaker for your phone, for bedtime listening. I find this works better than falling asleep with inserted earbuds, Bluetooth headband speakers, or a pillow speaker. I quietly use mine even when I am not alone. These also work great for two people sharing a bedtime audio book story, streaming radio drama, etc.

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