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It took a long time to get interesting.

Revisado: 04-28-25

I almost quit on this book many many times. I found the first eight chapters or so to be so confusing because it jumped back and forth in years and I could not keep it straight. I could not follow who was who and what was happening and I had to go back and read listen to parts of the chapters. I have read a number of the Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James series, but I never encountered one like this. Unfortunately I had started the series somewhere in the middle. After listening to a few books, I decided to start at the beginning and listen to the books in order to help me understand how & why the main characters were where they were in their life. I got most of my questions answered and hopefully, as I read more of the series, the books will not be as challenging as this one was in the beginning.

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Good Story

Revisado: 03-15-25

Did not care for Narrator. A good a little predictable towards the end, but had surprises.

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Too Slow and Long

Revisado: 03-03-25

The title of the book is very misleading. And I found it difficult to hold my attention in the early chapters and have to keep going back and re-listening. The narrator had very little distinction between characters. This is my first book of the series. I will check into the second and maybe listen to it if it has a different narrator.

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Lots of Words Not Much Depth

Revisado: 02-19-25

I found the bouncing between years very choppy. Each chapter is devoted to one character, but each one about that character seemed to be the same as the previous. Characters were hard to like and none had much depth. I ended up skipping chapters and found the last section of the book summed up the whole story and was easiest to listen too.

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Too Syrupy for Me

Revisado: 02-01-25

This book reminded me of a doughnut. It’s good for a few bites and then you reach a hole and then nothing happens for awhile and then it’s good for the last two bites. The title details for this book make it sound much more exciting and interesting than it is. At first it just seems like snippets out of days in the lives of individuals and you keep wondering when is the actual story going to begin. And finally it starts, but suddenly it goes back to banal every day life for people, actually too sweet and syrup for me.. Finally, the last 2 hours actually starts the story action again, although I found the ending very anti-climatic. This is the first book I’ve listened to by this author and I’m not sure that she is a writer I would enjoy reading again. I was not impressed with the narrators in the early portions of the book.

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You need to be fluent in French to understand names and story.

Revisado: 11-04-24

In my opinion, this was too complex a book with too many characters to break in a new narrator. The new narrator may be authentic to the French language, but how many readers are? I found this book, like many other reviewers, to be difficult to follow. It brings back storylines and characters from previous books, which taxes the memory to begin with, but trying to understand who the new characters are and differentiate between the names was impossible for me and I just gave up. Distinguishing between the voices was difficult - It was even to distinguish Jean-Guy from Armand in some of their conversations.

I know it is difficult to change narrators but this was not the book to do it. I went back several chapters numerous times to try to understand what had and was happening.

We all form a picture of the characters based on their voices. I am more than willing to be open to new representations, but unfortunately, changing narrators in this particular book had a negative impact. I felt like I didn’t know the characters that I have followed for all of Louise Penny’s books. I even wondered if Louise Penny used to go Rider for some chapters in this book. Or if she was branching out to change her style.

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Only gets good in the second half

Revisado: 07-28-24

I almost quit listening to this multiple times, but remembered that a few people said that it was a very slow beginning. Actually, it’s a slow first half of the book. Parts of the first half I thought were way too clinical and I thought it was going to be all focused on autism. There are perks that were very surprising and some parts that were very frustrating. I will read more of the reviews before downloading other books by this author

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Reminds me of War of the Roses

Revisado: 06-23-24

I like John Mares’ books, but I felt this one wasn’t one of his best. Book could have been edited and move faster. I am not a fan of moving back and forth between years, but at least this book had few characters so it was not confusing. I built some of it was predictable, but it does surprise you at times.

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Female Narrator Puts you to Sleep

Revisado: 05-12-24

I’m only on Chapter 8, but the female narrator keeps almost putting me to sleep. She would be great reading children’s stories or reading lullabies. In fact when I’ve had a difficult time going to sleep, I go to a Ballard caper and start listening and I’m asleep in less than 15 minutes. But trying to get through the book during the day makes my mind drift on her chapters. She has no emotions or infection in her narration. And it it hard to discern when she trying to narrate a male character. A Harry Bosch book is not her baileywick. I hope future Ballard and Bosch books have a different female narrator.

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Good Story And Narration

Revisado: 04-04-24

I really liked the story as I do with all of the books I’ve listened to from this author. What I did not like was the jumping back-and-forth in time -, not only in years, but in months and then years and then back in months and in years. I finally gave up trying to figure out, who said what when and just listened to the book and at some point, some of the characters repeated in a logical and sequence of what actually took place in chronological order. I don’t mind if long sequences pass and jump back and forth, but when you listen to 5 to 10 minutes of a month in a year and then it jumps ahead or back to five or 10 minutes of another year or days earlier, it gets mind-boggling. I seriously thought of keeping a pen and paper with me and writing down the month day and year of every chapter but that would drive me crazier than just listening. I will continue choosing books by this author because overall I like her writing. If there is another book that jumps back-and-forth as much as this one does I will probably just do the same thing and try to not understand the every single point in time.

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