Enjoyable Version

Really enjoyed this book. I thought the narrator did very well. He acted all the parts rather than just read them.

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Oh dear!

Terrible narration with many mispronunciations, even the surname of the main character was incorrectly pronounced.

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1 person found this helpful

Bad pronunciation

The story is lovely. Sadly the narrator got many pronunciations wrong, especially the lead characters name! It should have been pronounced Car-stairs, instead he pronounced it Car-star-ez which becomes very grating! Also Cholmondley should have been pronounced Chumley, not the way it is written. I felt he also made Richard sound very breathy and silly. I could have enjoyed it very much if not for those things.

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Great narration

Brilliant narration. Did lose my place with plot a few times as there are a lot of characters and sub plots but was made easier by narrator's excellent characterisations making it easier to discern them.

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brilliant book

loved it and sorry to finish. narration is pitched just right and easy to listen to. thankyou

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Ruined by the narrator

I cannot understand how a producer, director and editor at Penguin allowed the reader to miss-pronounce the hero’s name throughout the book! And other proper names - Grosvenor - plus several weird attempts at words including elbow, which became “below”, Duke and New were Americanised into Dook and noo. It really ruined a good story. His reading style was good; it flowed fairly well and was exciting to listen to, but the bizarre pronunciation spoiled it completely. There exists a much older - excellent - recording of The Black Moth which is available in the rest of the world but not licensed for the UK. Why? I do wish Audible would keep all recordings on the website, especially the older ones where the actors usually get the words right and even know what some of the more obscure words actually mean! One can tell immediately if the reader doesn’t understand what a phrase or sentence means. The better readers are also much less stilted in their delivery. Some readers seem to need to pause every six or seven words, whether it fits the sentence or not, thus losing flow and losing the meaning of the sentence. I have some six hundred audiobooks in my Audible library (!) so I have listened to some brilliant readers and a few so dire I cannot listen to more than two minutes of the sample. The best ones are works of art that take you away into another world. This, sadly, was not one of those.

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3 people found this helpful

Pronunciation

I have read this book at least 20 times and own a couple of audio versions. Totally annoying is the way the narrator pronounces the name of the leading character! He manages to turn an ordinary English name into a bizarre Italian one! If you don’t know the book then enjoy but if you do know the book you have been warned.

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The Black Moth

The story was good and the reader was excellent especially as so many people were involved

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Great story but the narration is flawed in places . . .

I looked forward in anticipation to a new audio version of this novel - a novel I know well. An earlier version was very good apart from an intensely irritating voice given to one character and I was hoping that the new recording would be an improvement. Alas, the same character is presented in an equally irritating way in this new version and, in addition, some other characters grate when occasionally they speak with an elongated vowel sound.
This is very picky of me, there is much to enjoy in this version and the story races along with many of the usual ingredients of a Heyer novel. Discovering her novels as a young teenager back in the 1960s was a delight; listening to them again (and again!) as I approach my dotage is equally delightful.

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5 people found this helpful

Black moth

Not one of her best, characters too caricatured. Found the voices of the characters by the reader pretty irritating, made the main character Jack not very likeable, the villain too much and his sister ridiculous. A real shame. I’m missing the old original recordings they are all so much better than these new ones.

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4 people found this helpful