Meredith Ramirez

Incredible

Revisado: 10-20-22

This may be my favorite volume so far. Love the characters, love the actors, love the plot, love the sound design. Absolutely amazing.

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Not so great narration

Revisado: 06-11-22

if you're going to have multiple narrators, at least have them agree on name pronunciations and general character accents. also the narrator for Wylan was just plain bad.

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Love it, but please mark as Abridged!

Revisado: 09-14-21

This book is such a delight, but I was so disappointed when I realized that this was an abridged version. It did not say anywhere in the description that it was abridged, which is a bit dishonest in my opinion. Although I loved Hugh Bonneville's narration, I recommend spending the credit on the full length version of the book!

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Slow

Revisado: 05-05-21

Do yourself a favor and listen to this at about 1.25x playback speed, unless you like listening to a narrator who sounds like he's stuck in a tar pit. You'll also get through this book faster, which is a blessing because the plot moves like molasses. The final 30 minutes of this book just barely redeemed the previous 23.5 hours, which were filled with blatant exposition, awkward dialog, and a fundamental misunderstanding of both women and character development.

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One of My All-Time Favorites

Revisado: 02-09-21

I read this book in high school and loved it, and recently I found out that a sequel had been released. I downloaded it to listen to again before reading the sequel and it still holds up as a top ten favorite after all these years. If you like sci-fi, you can't go wrong with C.S. Friedman!

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A Story and a Storyteller for the Ages

Revisado: 01-02-21

You simply cannot go wrong with Neil Gaiman. The writing is beautiful and the telling is enthralling. You will be captivated from start to finish. I think I could listen to this book a hundred times and never get bored of it.

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Save yourself nearly 30 hours and don't listen

Revisado: 09-23-20

I don't even know where to start. I'm pretty lenient with fantasy books. I can usually find some redeeming quality about even the trashiest of novels. I even found things to enjoy about Twilight. Like the fact that it was a quick read, for instance.

Not so for Elantris. This monstrosity of literature has no redeeming features. It is overly long and the story plods at a snail's pace. The author takes five minutes to describe something that could be said in fifteen seconds. I think he may have written this with a thesaurus close at hand so that he could use every possible synonym for a single descriptor. The plot is barely adequate, but takes so long to move forward that the listener loses interest or forgets what was happening before there was an entire chapter about something utterly inane and not at all relevant. Plot devices are rife throughout. Hey, remember that tooooootally unimportant detail we super-casually dropped one time and never brought up again? Well here it is again to save the day right in the nick of time!

Then there are the characters. Oh god, the characters. Mary Sue and Gary Stu can take a break, because Raoden and Sarene are the new tropes in town. When they're good at something (which is almost everything) they're experts of their craft or take little to no time to master a new skill. When they're bad at something (which is next to nothing), they're soooooo bad it's laughable (because balance, right?). Character development is nearly nonexistent, save maybe for the villains, and even that may be a stretch.

Character descriptions are often mismatched with what the characters actually do and say. Sarene is continuously described as being unbelievably clever and intelligent, yet she regularly fails her perception checks and gets herself into sticky situations that could easily be avoided with just the most minimal use of common sense. Actions speak louder than words, Sanderson, and Sarene is a total dunce. She's also portrayed as a pillar of feminism, helping the poor oppressed women of the book to find a voice. Yet, we never actually hear anything from these women, and they only really feature as a brief plot device in the very last chapter. Sarene also frequently exploits female stereotypes as a "cunning" way to ....??? Talk to people??? I don't know. I think I blacked out for most of her scenes.

This book doesn't seem to know when to end, either. There is a final chapter, and then an epilogue, then a note on the mechanics of the magic system (which is pretty boring, tbh), then FORTY FIVE minutes of "deleted scenes" (dontcha think they might have been "deleted" for a reason?), THEN an author's post script, and AFTER that there is another little story blurb that adds nothing whatsoever and feels like a push to force interest in a sequel (please literary gods in heaven above, let there never be a sequel to this book). I have never in my life been so relieved to hear the words "Audible hopes you have enjoyed this presentation!" (I have not.)

The flaming cherry atop this garbage fire of an audiobook is the narrator. I have heard broken violins that are less grating to listen to. His intonation is awful and he only has about three different character voices- Good Guy, Bad Guy, and Any Woman. To be honest, even those three sound pretty much the same.

So why did I listen all the way through? Why not just walk away? I dunno. What's the opposite of commitment issues? It certainly wasn't a need to find out what happens next. More of a "sunk cost" thing. I kept hoping it would improve, but by the time I finally gave up on that happening I had already given more that 12 hours of my life to this book, and I wanted that time to mean something. I guess that's why I'm writing this review.

Please don't let my sacrifice go to waste. Heed this warning. Save yourself. It's too late for me.

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