It's not terribly written where the language alone is concerned, but ye gods, I was absolutely bored to *death* by this one. Such a pity, because the It's not terribly written where the language alone is concerned, but ye gods, I was absolutely bored to *death* by this one. Such a pity, because the synopsis sounds so intriguing, but if I hadn't left it so late to start the audiobook, I'd have requested a refund for it, it was that bad.
As if that weren't enough, the narrator's speed was unlistenable (I rarely have to adjust the speed of my audiobooks for anything, but I did for this!).
Generally speaking, the plot is very slow for the 10% of the book that I managed to endure, none of the characters garner even passing interest, and if I'd had a physical copy of the print book I'd have pushed it away in disgust.
1.5 stars, rounded down (the half star is only for the use of language)....more
Read in audiobook, narrator Emma Gregory. (I can't choose format or edition in the Android app, which is still intensely annoying.)
I made it forty miRead in audiobook, narrator Emma Gregory. (I can't choose format or edition in the Android app, which is still intensely annoying.)
I made it forty minutes into this audiobook before I hit the pause button and went to check whether I had acquired it too recently to be able to return it. That speaks for itself, but I will elaborate.
The narrator, Emma Gregory, seems to be very talented, but she's utterly wasted on this book. Its major characters are intolerable - yes, the compulsively-lying leading lady March, as well as her male antihero counterpart - and the plot, such as there is of it, takes much too long to gear up. By the time I got half an hour in, I was being tempted to throw the book, and I make it a rule to stop reading if I feel that way about anything other than printed paper - to spare my phone, if nothing else!
Any audiobook that claims to be "funny", but has yet to make me even crack half a smile after half to three quarters of an hour of listening, isn't likely to have me rolling on the floor later on.
As for the comments that this is a pastiche of Sherlock Holmes... Well, "pastiche" is not a term I would use for it. Nor "parody". It's a very poor imitation. Quite apart from anything else, Holmes never displayed the classist snobbishness immediately apparent in Grice, and he had compassion and emotional intelligence despite his proclaimed disdain for emotions, traits that are in no way translated to his counterpart.
As for the plot that I did experience, it's poorly introduced, and the characterisation actually gets in the way, which is something most authors know better than to allow to happen in their writing. I won't be continuing with this one.
5 stars for narration, 2 for the book and overall - the latter only because the author's use of language was decent and comprehensive. It's a pity we can't merge Kasasian's use of language with the plotting and characterisation abilities of some fanfic authors I know -- then we might have an excellent book! Alas......more
It's not often a book bores me stiff, nor that I give up before finishing it. It's also very uncommon for me to buy an Audible book and return it (thaIt's not often a book bores me stiff, nor that I give up before finishing it. It's also very uncommon for me to buy an Audible book and return it (thankfully they allow this; if print bookshops did so I would probably have done it a time or two, as well; instead I just pass those on via BookMooch). Unfortunately, this one was an exception to all three of these categories.
The narration was OK - adequate, I suppose, but not sparkling - but nowhere near sufficient to redeem a very unoriginal tale told poorly, mostly from the third-person-limited perspective of a main character whom I could never grow to like, in spite of enduring two-thirds of the book before I gave up on it.
The most frustrating part about this book isn't so much the unoriginality of the plot. I know (from having read many of her Regency romance novels) that Beaton has the capacity to tell a story well, in a way that has the potential of redeeming a thin, boring or trope-ridden plot.
The frustration, for me, lies mainly in the fact that in this case not only is the story told in a dull, often irritating way, with very little originality of plot, when I know Beaton can do better than this, but it's also told by a character (yet another one of this author's creations who has been endowed with a very daft name—Fellworth Dolphin—with an origin story of unnecessary complexity) with whom the author has clearly sympathised themselves, or at least tried to make sympathetic to the eye of the reader, who comes over as not only extremely unsympathetic, but with a central trait of being profoundly self-centred.
I'm sure we were supposed to be rooting for Fell to solve the "mystery" (not much of a mystery) and "get the girl", but I just wanted said young woman to tell him to stop, sit down, shut up and think about something other than himself for five minutes at a stretch. He wasn't even the only character who annoyed me - Beaton's leading lady, Maggie, did plenty of that herself, in her total lack of consistency of character. Not to mention that totally unnecessary love triangle with ulterior motives that was such a blatant & poor-quality plot device to create tension in the relationship for which we were supposed to be cheering (I wasn't. I kept wanting to sit Maggie down and tell her she could do better, and that she shouldn't need to cake herself with make-up to do it).
Just. No. If you want a mystery laced into a romance, try Georgette Heyer, but don't even bother with this book. It's not remotely up to snuff, and the narration can't redeem a turkey this bad. If I could give it zero stars I would have. The narration gets one, the story doesn't get anything....more
2 stars. Decidedly not the best of the series; I was bored so rapidly that this book ended up in my DNF pile, as very few in its subgenre ultimately d2 stars. Decidedly not the best of the series; I was bored so rapidly that this book ended up in my DNF pile, as very few in its subgenre ultimately do....more
Obtained via Kindle Unlimited, and I'm glad I didn't strictly pay for it. Given a finished date as I read a fair bit of it, but it's going on my DNF pObtained via Kindle Unlimited, and I'm glad I didn't strictly pay for it. Given a finished date as I read a fair bit of it, but it's going on my DNF pile. I'm too bored by the mediocre plot and irritated by the slapdash and hopelessly ungrammatical writing style to waste more time on trying to complete it. I have far too many books on my TBR list to waste time with reading something I feel reluctant to revisit.
If you're a white male wanting to know what life might have been like for you if you travelled back in time to the 14th century, this book is probablyIf you're a white male wanting to know what life might have been like for you if you travelled back in time to the 14th century, this book is probably great and you're likely to enjoy it as it immerses you in a life you might have lived. Even if you're a man of another skin colour, you still might.
If you're a woman, or a non-binary person (or, even, a rape survivor of any gender)? Not so much. Mortimer has a very formal, very narrow focus in this book, which means he looks at the world mostly from the point of view of the biggest and best-known - in modern times, that is - historical sources of the era. He doesn't really look into much material that was popular in its time but less known now, from what I could gather. As is typical with the "best-known" historical sources - at least in terms of diarists and the like - prior to the late Victorian/early Edwardian era of the late 19th and early 20th century, most are from the viewpoint of a man, or at least published under the name of one. Admittedly, women's works were not published widely under female names before the late 17th century, with rare exceptions mostly being limited to religieuses. There are, however, many female authors of the period whose work he might have tapped but did not.
This does not excuse Mortimer's lack of resourcefulness and/or content in finding or including details about life as a woman in the 14th century to accompany the overwhelming mass of data, anecdata and detail that he includes about life as a man in that era. The book is far too heavily weighted in gender terms, and that makes it substantially less interesting to me. I have heard this is a flaw with his historical time-travel series' in general, and have witnessed it personally in his Elizabethan-era instalment. Where women's lives are mentioned, it is almost always in terms of their relationships to men or how they were treated or named by men of the time (and ways men of today should behave or are expected to behave when interacting with 14th century women!). Famed royal warrior women, influential abbesses, other women in powerful roles... so far as Mortimer is concerned they may as well never have existed at all.
The narration is the best thing about this book; though it's a little more formal than I should have expected for the approach taken by the author, it's still done very well indeed, and is quite appropriate to the material herein. I would rate the narration four stars, but the book itself only two. That being the case, and given the peculiarities of GR's rating system, I've rated this edition 2.5 rounded down to 2* (where my Audible review is rounded up to 3*). I am so disappointed in the book (and the author especially) that I plan to return it if I am permitted to do so.
I will be up-front about the fact that I did not finish reading this book. It irritated me too much; when I feel inclined to throw whatever I'm using to read at the nearest wall on more than one occasion, I believe that's a good time to say "no more" and give it up. Besides which, I listened to this using the Audible app on my Android phone (as I usually do for audiobooks), and my poor phone already has a cracked screen in two places; she doesn't need to be damaged further!...more
Abandoned. Too much territory already walked, and not enough originality to make it worth going all the way through again. If you're going to rewrite Abandoned. Too much territory already walked, and not enough originality to make it worth going all the way through again. If you're going to rewrite a classic folk story, you must put your own spin on it, and that means making it feel different to other popular versions of the tale, too. Setting this in Alaska doesn't do enough to that end. I don't often leave off books part-way through, but this just bored me. I'm being charitable rounding the 1.5 stars up to 2 for GR....more
I'm not even going to bother finishing this book. It was making me cringe page by page before I was even fifty pages in. The plot was boring and repetI'm not even going to bother finishing this book. It was making me cringe page by page before I was even fifty pages in. The plot was boring and repetitive, and the proofreading was just...not there at all....more
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