OYENTE

Laurene

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  • 19
  • votos útiles
  • 104
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Brilliant ghost story, Shirley Jackson tribute

Total
5 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
5 out of 5 stars
Historia
5 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 06-30-21

Anyone who's read Shirley Jackson's THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE will recognize that this is a tribute to that novel, the story of an incredibly lonely young woman being devoured by a malevolent house. I guess it's confusing if you're used to very basic, connect-the-dots horror stories, but I really don't see how anyone could miss the point. Gran brings something new to the premise by making the main character, who tells her story to an academic paranormal researcher, oblivious to what's happening to her. At first this seems a bit like a story in Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country, where a woman wins over the ghost that lives in her house and it protects her from her evil neighbors. This woman keeps insisting that her house is her best friend and gives her everything she needs. But she is an unreliable narrator and observant listener will soon learn to look through what she says to see the actual truth. I really like the Pasadena setting as well, both the architecture (that area has many great Craftsman-era houses, and a lot of people completely obsessed with them, like the main character here) and the history, as Pasadena has many connections to occult groups in the past. The performances are wonderful. Can't recommend this highly enough!

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esto le resultó útil a 4 personas

Missing Carol Monda

Total
4 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
4 out of 5 stars
Historia
5 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 10-08-18

I love me some Claire DeWitt, the hardboiled metaphysical detective of two previous books by Grann. This new book doesn't disappoint, and Madeleine Maby did a decent job narrating it, but for me Carol Monda will always be Claire and I could never quite get used to the switch. Monda just sounds tougher and worldlier, and you don't get much tougher or worldly than Claire DeWitt

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esto le resultó útil a 10 personas

Decent thriller, awful narrator

Total
3 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
1 out of 5 stars
Historia
4 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 02-07-18

This is a decent thriller, but I wish I’d noticed before buying this that it’s the same narrator who ruined much of David Grann’s amazing book, Killers of the Flower Moon last year. I literally bought the print version although I usually prefer the audio because I could not stand to listen to Ann Marie Lee a moment longer.

The main character of this novel is a basket case and like most thriller heroines seems a bit dumb at times. But I think this would be a lot less annoying without Lee’s narration. She always sounds weepy, whiny and tremulous, even when there’s no particular reason for it, and when there is it’s completely over the top. This makes Anna very hard to like. Lee also sounds like she’s about 60, which is confusing, since the character is only 38. I don’t know why such a high-profile book could not get a better performer. There are lots out there.

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esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

Literary biography at its best

Total
5 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
4 out of 5 stars
Historia
5 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 04-05-15

You don't have to be particularly interested in Updikes work to enjoy this. The writing is elegant, and thoughtful, without the usual plodding quality of many literary biographies.

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esto le resultó útil a 3 personas

Delightful mixture of the funny and poignant

Total
4 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
5 out of 5 stars
Historia
4 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 03-23-14

The premise of this novel is that a single event -- the mugging of an elderly lady -- can through its ripple effects change the lives of several people. Because Rose needs to convalesce at her daughter's home, her daughter meets one of Rose's pupils (she teaches immigrants to read English) and falls in love for the first time in middle age; unfortunately, she's already married. This is very sensitively and movingly handled. Other plots include Rose's employer, a prominent semi-retired historian, getting involved with plans for a television series -- that part is often hilarious as the slick TV producer decides he's so awful ("That waistcoat!") he could be a great presenter.

The events/plot of the story are not momentous or even especially tense, but I was always eager to get back to the characters and their lives and enjoyed every minute of Kellgren's performance. I'd recommend this book to people who like Ruth Rendell or Muriel Spark, but would occasionally like a less dark version or their view of human nature. Lively is not too sweet, but neither is she as harsh as those writers can be.

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esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

Fun steampunkish story, well read

Total
4 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
5 out of 5 stars
Historia
3 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 07-30-12

A clockwork repair guy trying to live a quiet, below-the-radar life in an alternate-present London gets embroiled in a quest to save the world from a doomsday device that works by causing people to experience existential despair.

This is a swashbuckling, steampunkish story, with a lot (but not too much) complexity and Daniel Weyman performs it very well. It's a little like a Neal Stephenson novel, but not nearly so thoughtful. That's why I've given the story three stars. It seemed like too intelligent of a construction to end by romanticizing gangsters and a climax that's an explosion of gleeful violence. Harkaway tries to fudge the issue by making the villain ridiculously evil and his minions a sort of automaton, but you can't have your cake and eat it, too. Either you're smarter than the average action movie, or you're not, and ultimately, Angelmaker isn't. Still, I enjoyed it.

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esto le resultó útil a 15 personas

Fun adventure story, but the narrator is too hammy

Total
4 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
3 out of 5 stars
Historia
4 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 07-01-12

I have a feeling I'd take this novel more seriously if it were read by someone who didn't feel compelled to overact. Phil Gigante seems popular, but I found him often nearly painful to listen to. His conceptions of the characters are cartoonish -- each one has only one mood as far as he's concerned. Since the Bedouin girl is initially angry and snappish, she always sounds angry and snappish, even when she's supposed to be talking about tender feelings. I might try another Saladin Ahmed novel in the future. I like the Middle Eastern context, and I have hopes he'll get past the modified superhero storyline, but I'll stay away from Gigante narrations from now on.

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esto le resultó útil a 6 personas

Delightful

Total
5 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
5 out of 5 stars
Historia
4 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 06-18-12

All Jeeves stories are pretty much the same, so I won't go into any detail about the various scrapes Bertie gets into. Suffice to say that Jonathan Cecil is my preferred delivery mechanism for this inimitably funny material.

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esto le resultó útil a 9 personas

My Sister's Keeper Audiolibro Por Jodi Picoult arte de portada

Lifetime Channel meets Dawson's Creek

Total
2 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
4 out of 5 stars
Historia
2 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 06-12-12

The various narrators do the best they can with this material, but they don't have much that's good to work with. The central situation -- the dilemma of a child who was conceived to be a tissue donor for her cancer-stricken sister -- is interesting, if potentially sensational. Unfortunately, it's very contrived, particularly the ridiculous ending.

Every character is constantly dispensing little metaphorical homilies and maxims where they compare various emotional situations to the stars, fire, hockey, law, etc. I think they're meant to be underlined by the kind of readers who go, "Oh, what a wise and funny life lesson!" It is incredibly irritating and pat to anyone else. Everyone talks in more or less the same way, with tepid wisecracks that are meant to make them endearing and then super-articulate expressions of their feelings that most real human beings could never produce. Everything they say is on-the-nose, like dialogue from a TV movie. The set-ups are oppressively obvious: The father is a fireman, so of course the acting-out teenage son is a pyromaniac! Duh.

This is the first, and I expect the last, Jodi Picoult novel I'll ever try.

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esto le resultó útil a 22 personas

Beware, not a professional narrator

Total
1 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
1 out of 5 stars
Historia
4 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 05-22-12

I think this is one of the Librivox recordings made by volunteers and available for free elsewhere on the web. Don't buy it. The narrator, while no doubt well-meaning, isn't able to read the 19C text in a way that matches the actual sense. You'll find it much more difficult to follow than it should be. This sort of amateur production should not be sold, for however little, on Audible.

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esto le resultó útil a 6 personas

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