great.

it say great. made me laugh. I loved it. listened to it all the time.

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Weak overall

What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?

While the concept is interesting, it is obvious that this is a novice work. It needs a deal more polishing and a completely different narrator. I thought maybe the author did the narration and self published, but I guess not.

How would you have changed the story to make it more enjoyable?

Needs more polish and maybe expand it out. There were no surprises and the bad guy screamed bad guy right from the get go.

How could the performance have been better?

Narrator is the equivalent of Kristen Stewart and lacks proper expression. I'm hoping it was her first attempt. She needs to step back and think more about the characters she is portraying.

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

The only emotion the book evoked is a vague curiosity about how this would have turned out with a few more months of polish.

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Narration too fast, Book too short

The Good: writing

I loved the writing but I do take issue with the "Novel" label being used. To be frank, it isn't a novel. It's far too short. At 175 pages with 300 words per you get around 52K words. With the speed talking that gives us less then 4 hours of audio. Modern novels are 6-12 hours long with the typical being 8 hours at 100k+ words. Yes a novel if your being super generous can qualify at 40-60k words but it's not just that. The writing style is that of a short story that has been expanded to hit the magic novel word count.

The Bad: Audio

The narration is terrible. I liked her voice but voice acting is a talent, It's not something just anyone can do. Several times i could not figure out who was who because Erica did not fully seperate the first character from the next. One time it happened mid sentance. I cannot believe no one caught that. I also don't think she has the skill to do male voices. I listened to some other stuff Erica Risberg has done via samples here on audible and they are all just as bad.

The audio editing is terrible. In several places it's super obvious that the sound clips were recorded at different times because you could hear a difference in the background hiss. Audio volume was off too. One scene starts with Sadie thinking / explaining something. We hear mono tone and low volumn. Thats good. Then she starts talking to someone. It's active dialog so the audio volume increases and we start to hear emotion. Also perfect but then another character responds to what she said and the recorded volumn goes up again. What??? It makes no sense. For a while there i thought i had confused who was who again before i realized the louder voice was a bad audio splice.

The last thing I would like to mention, the audio speed. I felt like I was listening to a speed reading contest. My guess is someone was trying to save money everywhere and the final attempt at maximizing profit was forcing the book to fit onto 3 CD's. When ya go cheap on the voice actor (can't seperate voices), the recording studio (background noise), the sound editing (misaligned audio volume) combined with penny-pinching on the CD's, you end up wasting your time. Self publishing isn't for everyone.

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