Laura Ekstrand

Solid story ruined by virtual voice

Revisado: 03-28-25

Virtual voice narration may improve access to this book, but I don’t recommend listening to it expecting a “performance.” This was a solid book with good potential, given a talented narrator. Instead, the focus necessary to understand the automated narration had me picking up on every weak point in the writing (typos, grammar, level of detail, etc.), not to mention, obscuring, emotion and making it difficult to determine which character was speaking or thinking. While the technology has come a long way, it still has a ways to go before voice actors become a thing of the past.

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Book has potential

Revisado: 10-26-21

Light listen while doing housework, pleasant enough and requires minimal effort. Trade-offs are relatively flat characters and poor descriptive flow among the sensory perceptions, speech, paralanguage, and cognitions that form the full picture of communication in the setting of the human experience. Lots of “thought” and “said” (or similar). Occasional incorporation of period language comes off stilted in the face of otherwise unimaginative present-day-style writing that is soft on the wit, word play, command of connotation, and use of phonetic spelling that could have been used to distinguish among different classes, personalities and intellects. Good narration might have made the difference, as there seems to be room for the actor to build out the characters’ background stories and bring this “color” to the reading. However, the narrator did quite the opposite, barely succeeding in more than distinguishing male and female voices, plowing through the book in a monotonous simmering panic reminiscent of a television newscaster. The resulting auditory experience was much like the writing - “Just the facts, ma’am.”

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