Carla

Book is super sweet, but the reader is hard to endure.

Revisado: 07-30-24

I hate when a book has characters with accents and the audiobook reader can't do the accent!! Overall, her voice was just too little girlish for me. I know the main character is young, but the voice just didn't work for me.
On the other hand, this story is really sweet. It's maybe a bit too whimsical/utopic in some ways, but I've loved it since I was young myself, so listening was a great walk down memory lane.

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Great, unsettling read. Great performance but some wild mispronunciations.

Revisado: 01-16-24

This story gets to something raw and scary about grief, and about our desperate desire to remake ourselves in the wake of tragedy. I loved the narrator, but the editing team or whoever needed to catch some of her mispronunciations and correct them. No judgements but there were some really jarring ones. Examples: chasm and homage. There were a number of other noticeable ones I can't remember at the moment.
Skip this one if you don't like characters who are mentally unstable or having your heart ripped out of your chest. Gorgeous and haunting.

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Some voices are unbearable

Revisado: 01-03-24

The voice he does for the dragon is pretty ridiculous. Worse are some of the breathy, over-acted voices the reader does for female characters. This story would really benefit from a larger cast.
It's a fun classic fantasy tale. The main character is a little frustrating at times but overall a good story. I wouldn't recommend listening to it, though.

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Side character voices were grating

Revisado: 06-18-22

This reader has a nice voice normally, but all the voices he did for other characters were whiny and irritating, some didn't match the characters. It pulled me out of the story.

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(Mostly) Original and Addicting

Revisado: 11-16-18

If you like the Hunger Games, Ender's Game, or really any other dystopian series of note, you will probably love this too. Fair warning, it's sprinkled with sometimes too-familiar moments, where the flavor of those other works seems to dominate, but I still came away thinking it unique, hugely entertaining, and totally worth it. It takes a bit to get going, but once it does it has the kind of well-paced, high-suspense action that leads you to devour the entire thing in one sitting.
#dystopian #sci-fi #fantasy #unlikelyhero #underdog #wargames #fastpaced #comingofage #tagsgiving #sweepstakes

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Another Mystery With a Horrible Female Lead

Revisado: 11-13-18

I picked this up because of an intriguing mention on Twitter, despite having been frustrated and wholly disappointed with the last few popular thriller/mystery books I've read. Sadly, this one did not renew my faith in the genre. The obsession with unreliable, self-absorbed, "flawed but relatable" (but actually completely insufferable) female narrators in this genre is driving me round the bend. Jill, our supposed heroine, is whiny and self-pitying. Yes, she is suffering from memory loss and the loss of her best friend, so you expect her to be in a good deal of pain. But what comes across in her portrayal isn't pain so much as annoyance and self-victimization. We don't really get a very clear picture of who she was before the "accident (or not?...)" that begins the book, so it's hard to root for her. It takes ages for a clear picture of events to unfold, and I really couldn't care less what happened to Jill by the end of it. The "twist" at the end was promised to be interesting and new, but I found it gimmicky and completely predictable. It's going to take a lot for a thriller/mystery to win me back over...this might have been the last straw.

#unreliablenarrator #Italy #thriller #unreliablefemalenarrator #horriblefemalecharacters #torturedhero #Tagsgiving #Sweepstakes

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Fans of the Dresden Files Will Love

Revisado: 11-13-18

This is a goofy, over-the-top sci-fi mystery romp. It reminded me a lot of the Dresden Files, only with a sci-fi bent rather than fantasy. The main character, Blake Fowler, is a bit of a bruiser, quick to remind the reader that he's not the brains of the operation, despite obviously being clever enough to solve problems quickly in an emergency. His partner, an absentminded professor type called Erasmus Keane, is less relatable...more of an enigmatic plot device. The book is a wild romp through an over the top, capitalism-to-the-max, dystopian sci-fi future. The mystery itself is a little convoluted at times, but overall it was a fun read and enough got solved to satisfy while leaving enough mystery for sequels to come.
#scifi #futurenoir #scifidetective #ifyoulikethedresdenfiles #tagsgiving #sweepstakes

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Heartrending and Original

Revisado: 11-13-18

The premise for this story (a machine that can tell you what to do to be "happy," usually a list of totally strange and inexplicable things like "eat honey" or "don't slouch") is strange but simple, and serves as a backdrop for some truly well-rendered human drama. Pearl, a technician who uses the titular machine to tell people their paths to contentment, struggles to understand why her teenage son doesn't seem to want to be happy and healthy. Her efforts to get closer to him and to help him are heartbreaking and so relatable. Meanwhile Rhett, the son in question, is lost in a world that doesn't make sense to him, a character that anyone who struggled as a teenager, or just with the overwhelming strangeness and difficulty of living will understand.
The cast of characters who populate the novel are unique and interesting, and I found myself won over (sometimes inexplicably) by every single one of them. It touches on so many relevant themes: our obsession with the quest to be happy, our reliance on psychology and technology, our struggle to make true connections in a world where we are all stuck in our own unique experiences. This is a bittersweet story, not simple enough for traditional happy endings, but I loved it.
#heartfelt #clever #femaleprotagonist #speculativefiction #humandrama #psychology #technology #tagsgiving #sweepstakes

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Another Weird Romp from Karen Russel

Revisado: 11-13-18

Of Karen Russell's short story collections, this definitely gets beat out by Vampires in the Lemon Grove in my opinion, but it still has a lot of the strangeness and beautiful descriptions that won me over to her writing. The stories in this collection seem to inhabit a darker, more bitter world to me, one of quiet desperation. However, the story "Sleepaway Camp for Disordered Dreamers" won me over, encapsulating the cheeky humor and sense of the bizarre-made-ordinary that made me love Karen Russell. Definitely worth a read.

#dark #MythologyInspired #fables #mindbending #magicalrealism #darkfantasy #shortstories #absurdist #haunting #tagsgiving #sweepstakes

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Amazingly Weird

Revisado: 11-13-18

This is, quite possibly, my favorite short story collection of all time. It is everything I love about both short stories and magical realism, and it has single-handedly turned me into a devoted Karen Russell fan for life. The stories are strange, creepy, beautiful, and (despite a lot of darkness and dangerous predicaments) hopeful. The originality displayed here is unprecedented, and the settings and plots of each story are so completely weird and unexpected that there's no way you could possible get bored. "Reeling for the Empire" is one of the most profound, disturbing, and beautiful pieces I've ever come across, perfectly capturing the hopes and perils of Japan at the onset of industrialization. There is a story in here about former US presidents re-incarnated as horses in a barn...you can't make this stuff up. "Dougbert Shackleton's rules for Antarctic tailgating" is another absolute favorite, a hilarious and perfect blend of satire and absurdity. Honestly, there isn't a story in this collection that I don't completely love, which has never happened to me before, but hopefully (with new work from Russell herself?) will again, very soon.
#dark #clever #absurd #magical #shortstories #magicalrealism #whimsy #favoriteshortstories #fantastical #tagsgiving #sweepstakes

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esto le resultó útil a 7 personas