You’re better off getting a physical copy

I have no issues with the story, if you like Game of Thrones, you’ll enjoy this book.

However, the reason I’m writing this review, is that I cannot finish the book because the narration is so appalling.
Cheesy and over-acted, the narrator uses nonsensical accents that don’t even stay consistent throughout the book (with each passing chapter Tyrion becomes more Welsh, for some absurd reason). The voices are grating, and the over exaggeration of the characters makes you feel like you’re listening to an episode of Family Guy. I would rather listen to the announcements on the train on my commute than Roy Dotrice’s impression of Shireen Baratheon. Awful.

18 people found this helpful

please change narrator !!

Someone else narrating these books would have there work cut out for them especially after the HBO series's
but please let someone try !! I would love to listen to all these books again but the narrator is awful and ruins them all
be warned when buying these books all the different voices for all the characters change with each book it is very frustrating !
especially the way Roy turns Tyrion Lannister into a leprechaun and Tywin Lannister in to Winston Churchill
and Arya Stark (who should be northern) is an old Irish woman and on and on its so BAD ! !

I would be more than happy to buy the books to listen to again if a new narrator is found the books are definitely worth a second chance.

20 people found this helpful

Brilliant story, cringey narration

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

I absolutely loved the book, and I enjoyed the storytelling. But as someone who has both read the first book and seen the show, the narrator made some choices that I felt didn't make any sense. I must've missed that part in the story where the Lannisters sent Tyrion to Wales for a while, since he has a thick welsh accent while the others do not. Some other points where I seriously considered returning this was when I heard the pronunciation of certain names. A word of warning; only buy this if you are willing to listen to Brienne being pronounced BRI-EEN and Petyr being Pet-IRE. It drove me up the wall.

How could the performance have been better?

Maybe check up on familial ties between characters before you start doling out random accents.

41 people found this helpful

Great Book - spoiled by poor narration

My plan to listen to this with a glass of wine whilst languishing in a hot bubble bath was sadly cut short when I started to listen to Roy Dotrice narration. I am not sure if Roy Dotrice was using this opportunity to practice his regional accents, or looking for a part in the next Pirates of the Caribbean either way I was left feeling incredibly frustrated by wasting money on this book and the waste of such a wonderful bath.

Oh well back to reading I think and PS Mr Dotrice if you are looking for a tip - when reading a character with an accent a try give them the same accent throughout.

47 people found this helpful

Addictive

I started this series having watched the Game of Throne series on TV and it has not disappointed.  It does take time to get into the stories as there are so many characters, plot lines and background history.  What really helped me to follow what is happening was a website called Tower of the Hand, which has summaries of each chapter and links to biographies of all the characters. 

A great ranges of interesting characters with most showing shades of good
and bad in their actions.    Tyrion the dwarf is a great literary creation.  The author is a natural  story teller,  packing the narrative with sparkling dialogue, inventive action, and most chapters end on cliffhangers.  Unusually for
a fantasy series many of the early battles are only described to us in the third person, although later books start to describe the battles as first person encounters.

21 people found this helpful

True...

...this series deserves a better reader than Dotrice, but, that admitted, it's still one of the best ways of consuming this series although having to buy the book twice - no one volume is longer than War and Peace and other hefty volumes that are sold as one so why are these sold in two full price parts - is a bane and the strongest argument against listening to it in this way

32 people found this helpful

Don't forget to get part 2!

The way the publisher has split a single volume into two parts is not only blatant profiteering but has limited my enjoyment of the series. This is the second time I have gone on to the next book without realising I had not finished the book I was reading!! The result is I know what is going to happen in the second part of this volume because I have listened to the start of the next book. The way Audible catalogues the books doesn't help- I have tried a couple of different filters and none place parts 1 and 2 of this volume together. It would help if Audible could warn you when you buy the book that it is in 2 parts, as other providers do. Started a new book by a diffferent auther- I might come back to this, but may just give up.

43 people found this helpful

Spliiting into parts is a ripoff

I enjoyed listening. However the lack of variation in voices made the experience often confusing, and I felt cheated that after buying part 1, I had to buy part 2 separately to finish the story. Will not buy another book with this reader and with this being charged twice system.

25 people found this helpful

Amazing story, poor narration.

This picks up where the recent HBO tv series left off. Obviously the book is better than the tv show, in fact the book starts good and by the end is utterly engrossing (and pretty dark). Unfortunately the narrator (Roy Dotrice) makes it pretty hard going by leaving inexplicable pauses in the middle of most sentences and attributing the most bizarre voices to the characters. His accent repertoire seems to consist of either irritatingly posh or rural with learning difficulties. Very strange choice of narrator for such a high profile book in my opinion. Still the story is so good that I'm going to listen to the next one anyway.

38 people found this helpful

Narrator

Roy Dotrice has a good voice and as narrator he's perfect. Given the geography of Westeros, it's OK to give the Lannisters welsh accents. The irish/scottish accents for other regions of the island are very confused though and seem to be random and inconsistent. From the delivery, many of the "little people" seem to be mentally impaired (not there in the text). BUT the worst choice in the exaggerated Churchill accent for Tywin Lannister, truly AWFUL. It made the scenes with him in a painful nails-down-a blackboard experience!
There are an enormous number of characters so there would have to be lots of generic "voices" but does every sailor have to be Robert Newton's long john silver?

19 people found this helpful