Awful narration and lacklustre story

Not sure which was worse the narration or the story itself. Either way the terrible robotic narration, the main (spoiled female teenage) character who needed a whack in the face combined to achieve a lacklustre audio book. I tried the narration at various different speeds which normally improves things but it certainly didn’t fix things on this one. I likened the narration style to be similar to that heard by under 8’s in school story time. Half expected the narrator to say at the close of the book ‘and that children is the end’ in a sing song teacher voice.

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Classic Heyer let down by poor narration

Heyer never disappoints but this reading did. Poor choice of emphasis on so many words and just odd phrasing and rhythms that jarred and were simply incorrect in places. Very odd that no one spotted this in editing and that this wasn’t corrected.

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1 person found this helpful

Appalling narrator

Even by a usual standard of terrible narration, this one wins all the prizes. Flat and monotonous, unable to pronounce the simplest words - who pronounced puss as pus??? The narrator is a very poor reader, and by no means meets even a basic standard for narration. She doesn’t understand the characters and so her intonation and timing is completely wrong. Sir Gareth’s charm, Lady Hester’s gentle humour, Amanda’s vivacity, Hildebrand’s passion, all complete lost. A wonderfully funny and timeless story is rendered null and void by the wrong choice of narrator. I will avoid anything read by this narrator in the future. So disappointed that there appears to be so little quality control within Audible.

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Oh dear

This is one of my favourite Georgette Heyer stories. The heroine is brilliantly funny, the narrative full of sparkle and wit.

Unfortunately, the narration is stilted, with some sentences so badly read that the meaning is lost. Certainly there is no real sense of the story here.

I wish that there was some real quality control on Audible. It’s not good enough to just read words. There must be much more to it than that. Please only use narrators who understand the books and actually can convey the humour.

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Badly narrated

Very sad that the book was read with so many mistakes/mispronunciations, as others have noticed. It was really distracting!

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4 people found this helpful

Light regency romance

One of Georgette Heyer’s light, tangled regency Romances - a relaxing read. Unfortunately the narration was appalling.

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Story, as usual with Heyer, is brilliant, but the reader is atrocious

The reader is really bad. For instance, the word is Mama, not Moma and Papa, not Popa. Also all the A’s were flat, the word mischievous was wrongly pronounced as were a number of other words. The delivery was stilted with wrong intonation throughout.

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7 people found this helpful

Dreadfully punctuated reading!

This is a lovely book from Heyer but is spoilt by very poor reading where commas are treated as full stops and the flow of the text is all wrong!!

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3 people found this helpful

Typically brilliant Heyer poorly narrated

I expected nothing but enjoyment from the audio of an often read book. Sadly the many mispronunciations, such as "mumma" and "poppa" rather than mama and papa, "thu" instead of "the" became increasingly grating, and certainly argued a lack of understanding of the era of the book. Combined with such awkward phrasing and pauses that some sentences lost the original meaning, the narration has all the feel of words read for the first time and not understood. Perhaps the narrator would benefit from listening to other narrations of period books to understand the pronunciation and phrasing.

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Very poor narration

This is one of Heyer’s most charming and funny stories but it was ruined for me by very poor narration. Dreadful pronunciation (e.g. Mama, Papa, valise, whooping cough, liefer - these are just a few) but the author’s punctuation was not followed; and overall it was just very flat and monotonous in tone. Disappointing, because many in this series have been very well narrated. Please have this one re-recorded with a better narrator.

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