Amazon Customer

Scott Brick Couldn’t Save This Book

Revisado: 08-04-24

I don’t know from James Patterson, but this is not Michael Crichton. The dialogue is so terrible even the incomparable Scott Brick’s performance was unbearable - only so much he could do with this material. Plot is nonsense. Characters are flat and undeveloped at best - at worst, the characters have no bearing on the plot and sound like something a second grader might put in a creative writing assignment (i.e. a lunatic murderous billionaire photographing the volcano just because he can). Helicopters, radioactive pesticide, (pseudo)military bungling… Nobody I’ve spoken to has made it through this book after buying it. Save your money; save your better memories of Michael Crichton’s work.

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Yes, thank you.

Revisado: 03-19-22

Felt like I waited forever for this to come out. Great characters and banter, awesome concept. Basically as fun and imaginative as reading Jurassic Park for the first time as a kid, but not as dark. Wil Wheaton’s performance was excellent, engaging, energetic. The only thing he could’ve done better was using accents and a little stronger voice characterization here and there. But that said, he didn’t need to, just would’ve brought it from a high-nine review to a ten on my part. Recommend for anybody that wants a fun read and appreciates geeky sci-fi humor.

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Upgrade the performance

Revisado: 10-17-19

I don’t know what’s behind this narrator’s performance: rush job, undeveloped reading skills, one take, low production value... but this needs to be redone. It’s like being in a classroom with a student forced to read under pressure, stumbling through, mispronouncing words, awkward pauses. We can do better.

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Total Waste if Effort

Revisado: 09-17-19

Maybe it’s that the main character is awful and not that the writing is derivative garbage, but I cannot get into a story about a girl who’s dumb enough to pack her lunch - a baggie (pronounced “baeggie” like bagel by this narrator) of raisins because she can’t afford both lunch and admission to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Basic research: admission is pay what you want. Which means you can buy a Manhattan-priced baeggie of raisins from Zabars after you wander the Met all day for 25 cent. It’s not the Guggenheim. My advice: save your admission to this book. It’s been written before, and better. If you need a fix of women whose ambitions stretch only to stealing someone else’s wealthy man, then just rent The Women. The original one. Because you’re still functioning on a women’s lib paradigm from the 1930’s.

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Narrator Mis-Cast

Revisado: 02-12-19

Overall an enjoyable listen. The first 30 minutes or so weren’t as smooth as they might have been because I was adjusting to the narrator, who didn’t seem a good fit for the author’s voice. Just a little too formal and an obvious outsider to the subject matter. Still, once I got used to him, the slightly off delivery of jokes or witticisms ended up a little endearing and his performance melted into the background. All-in-all, a good peek inside a marginalized fan community.

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Overacted. Underwritten.

Revisado: 02-11-19

This narrator over-delivers Every. Single. Word. It’s impossible to follow the story because the narrator emphasizes each verb, each adjective, each noun - with extreme and super-dramatic pronunciation, voice quivering with emotion - like a talentless high school theater kid trying to be profound in a speech contest. The point of the words is totally lost. As far as the SF element is concerned: this main character kid is stranded in space, alone, but everything he encounters is just like a lazy earth hybrid (rivers of earth water with “hammerhead eels”). Bad science. More important: bad survival instincts or terrible survival advice. You’d think the point of a tweenage SF book would be to show a kid the can survive, but this kid wouldn’t even survive here on earth, maybe not even if he was stranded in a five star hotel with room service. Ten minutes roughing it on a foreign planet, he makes every conceivable mistake... sorry but he wouldn’t make it, and no kid should be exposed to this as acceptable life-sustaining behavior. Skip this one and let your kids listen to some old Heinlein for younger readers.

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She Thought It Was Just Women (But It Isn’t)

Revisado: 01-30-19

There is some very good, positive insight about how women experience and cope with shame in this book. And I think everyone can benefit from this book. Unfortunately, the author closes with a flippant gloss-over about male shame, insinuating that men are basically 1-dimensional caricatures of human beings who only experience shame in terms of weakness or “not looking like I can kick your ass.” This may be a significant counterpoint to the female experience - However: These days men also experience shame about the full gamut of things women do: appearance, weight, correct parenting, having to be simultaneously courteous/gentle/tender/vulnerable and aggressive/tough/strong/invulnerable. The author suggests that most cultural reinforcement for male role expectations are reinforced only by men, yet her primary cited example is of a wife wholly rejecting her husband for failing to live up to her financial achievement expectations. The focus on women’s shame is good, on the one hand, and needed. But if we’re talking about the need to bring shame out into the open for discussion, let’s not minimize (and thereby reinforce) the shame experiences of approximately half of the global population. As I said, it’s okay to focus research and specialize. But for a book focusing on sensitivity to shame, it seems myopic to assume that a nuanced comprehension of shame only applies to women when 65% of global suicides are are committed by men. This disclaimer aside, this is a worthwhile read (or listen).

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Distracting Poor Narration

Revisado: 04-25-16

This narrator used the worst "cockney" accent I have ever heard. It sounded like a person with developmental disabilities using baby talk - absolutely not the rough East-Ender accents the story calls for. It was horribly distracting from the flow of the story. Considering she used the same accent with the same vocalizations for all the British male characters (nearly half the characters in the book), it was also very confusing.
Also bizarre was the fact she gave tough guy New Yorkers a slight Southern American twang.
I've gotta say Renee Raudman was the wrong choice to voice this story. I think she'd be good if all the characters were Midwestern Americans with a slight lateral lisp - yes, she's got that, too. But she doesn't have the skill set to illustrate regional dialects within America, and absolutely not across Britain. I was embarrassed for her. Unprofessional.
The strength of Nora Roberts' storytelling, and the fact I was trapped on an overseas flight, is all that got me through this, cringing all the while at the vocal performance.

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