qq horrid narration nearly ruined it your me!!

I was so looking forward to getting my 'ears on' to sadly conclude this amazing (thus far) trilogy by C.L.Polk. The books have been very well written & the narration for the first 2 books was spot on. I've only just started this last book & am only about an hour into it (just!) & I'm really, really, really, really struggling with the awful narrator!! Perhaps she's just having a bad day' but following on from Moira Quirk (who read book 2 superbly well), this new narrator, Robin Miles, is really so very bad. Her accents are so all over the shop for the protagonists - sometimes Jamaican, Nigerian, South African, & a strange conglomeration of all, etc.(.. it's truly jarring to my ear & putting me off listening & enjoying.

I'm sure Robin does a fine job voicing other books, but she's completely robbed me of my one delight - which is listening to excellent audiobooks.

Furthermore, there's one character - Zelland - who we believe to be male, is continually referred to add he, she, her, him... so one begins to question whether or not Zelland is a man or a woman!! come on, audible... fix this please!

CL Polk has written a fantastic trio with this series & has won herself a new fan (and I, a new author to explore!)

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Evocative but disengaging

The plot was less original and certainly more predictable than the previous books in the series. The political characters and movements seemed precise stereotypes while the relationship between the heroine, Robin, and her ‘spouse’ probably achieved the opposite of the author’s intent. Rather than allowing the reader to relate to a ‘non binary’ romance, the impossibility of visualising the spouse figure at all made the effort of doing so more like solving a mathematical problem than reading a story and the relationship itself a remote hypothetical rather than a human experience.

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Disappointed with the narration, couldn’t finish the story

I hate to do this as I enjoyed the previous two books.

I thought Robin was a Black Welsh lady. The narrator’s accent is all over the place and nothing like how Robin was portrayed before. By the time I got to the fourth chapter I gave up and I’d already restarted the audiobook three times hoping it would get better.

I’m going to read the book instead because I’m really looking forward to seeing how it all pans out.

I googled the narrator out of curiosity and she has won awards and is very well regarded, so I’m not sure what happened here. I later checked and I own and have enjoyed a few books that Robin Miles narrated; so this one must just be a blip.

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2 people found this helpful

The narrators fake British accent is unlistenable

The narrators is concentrating so hard on her British accent that the emphasis is in all the wrong places and the meaning of the sentence is often lost.
She’s a great actress in her normal voice (she’s narrated other books well) , and her Caribbean accent for some characters is good, but the odd black country / cockney fusion of the main character voice is just awful .

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