Clementine

Author: Cherie Priest

Readers: Dina Pearlman and Victor Bevine

Available from Audible.Com

Short Review: This sequel to Boneshaker follows Captain Croggon Hainey as he tracks and attempts to recover his airship, The Free Crow, from its captors. It also introduces Maria Isabella Boyd, a former Confederate spy turned Pinkerton, on her first assignment. It’s good, but not quite as good as Boneshaker.

Long Review: I’m a huge fan of this series, and found Boneshaker absolutely enthralling. This sequel follows Hainey, one of the more interesting minor characters from the first novel, and introduces Boyd, an intriguing character based on a historical figure. It follows an interesting dangling thread from that first novel, but to do so, it has to leave leave Seattle. The Seattle of Boneshaker was so inventive and layered that I had a hard time following the author away from it.

All whining aside, this is a very good audiobook. Priest is an excellent writer, and her attention to detail and excellent knowledge of American history make these books ring true, even with rather fantastic “alternate” content to deal with. The book is expertly read by Pearlman and Bevine, taking turns in Boyd’s and Hainey’s sections, respectfully, much as Reading and Wheaton did for the two main characters in Boneshaker. The switching perspective keeps the action moving along at a good clip while also elucidating two very different people.

Moreover, Priest tackles complex, layered questions of social justice in her books without clobbering the reader over the head. I’m always thrown when people address the Civil War or other momentous transitions in history without considering vital threads such as human rights, equality, changes in social mores, and the like. In this series, Priest is delving into questions of women’s rights, race relations, immigration, states vs. federal rights, property rights, international meddling in civil wars, medical ethics . . . the social and ethical questions she raises are manifold, and it’s the weaving of those questions into the fast-paced drama that really makes these books sing. This isn’t just fantasy. It’s a history lesson blending with an ethics class as well, and all of it makes these books worth returning to.

Boneshaker

Author: Cherie Priest

Readers: Kate Reading and Will Wheaton

Short Review: A steampunk adventure set in an alternate-history Seattle where the Civil War just won’t end, airships abound, mad scientists run amok, volcanoes make zombies, and intricate questions about liberty and rights continually rear their heads.

Long Review: For no good reason whatsoever, a paper copy of this book languished on my shelf for a few months before I finally broke down and bought the audio version. Initially, I’d been hesitant to listen to it because I was never a of Star Trek (I know, I know) so I didn’t have any particular connection to Will Wheaton. I also hesitate to get hooked on series that are still being written. I finally got over it and dove right in, listened to the whole series, and then listened to them again. I’m itching to start a third time, but figure I can wait for the next installment.

Will Wheaton does a great job narrating the sections of the book following Zeke, a runaway teen trying to prove that his father was a good man. Kate Reading reads the sections following Zeke’s mother Briar Wilkes, the daughter of Seattle’s late Sheriff and widow of a disgraced scientist and inventor. I adored both readers, but I particularly fell for Kate Reading’s voice. She strikes the perfect balance between Briar’s strength and the desperation that she struggles with as she searches for her son and tries to survive the nightmare that Seattle has become in the wake of her husband’s actions.

Priest is an excellent researcher, and this series really showcases her knowledge of 19th century American history. I’m often hesitant to read historical fiction or alternate histories because I find weak research so annoying, but there’s nothing to worry about with Priest’s books. She picks the perfect things to extend the Civil War in her story, and develops a creepy, fascinating plot to explain her changed Seattle.

Moreover, Priest develops excellent characters. Many series fizzle out after the first few books because the author only manages to build a few solid, interesting characters. With this book, Priest introduces a cast of fascinating people, all of whom I want to follow for book after book. The women she writes are particularly interesting, and Zeke reads true as a good but confused teen. Priest set the hook deep with Boneshaker, and I can’t wait to see where she’ll go with the rest of the series.

Wild Decembers

Available from Audible.com

Author: Edna O’Brien

Reader: Suzanne Bertish

Short Review: A beautiful book, poorly served by bad audio quality and frequent mispronunciations.

Long Review: I’m a huge fan of O’Brien’s work, so I was intrigued to find her fantastic novel on Audible’s site. I was warned of the poor audio quality by other reviewers, but I decided to trudge on and see how I reacted to O’Brien’s rich, poetic prose read aloud.

The audiobook was clearly dubbed from CD to a downloadable file. Some remnants of the CDs remain, such as a direction to change CDs. That I could easily ignore. The hiss, flattened tone, and slubs I can’t. I know enough from hanging out in recording studios to know that someone could have corrected most of the audio problems in this version.

Even more irksome are the repeated mispronunciations of Irish words. I know that Irish is a difficult language to read and pronounce. Oh, how I know. But that’s all the more reason that the reader and editor should have done their homework and made sure to get those words right. Cú Chulainn is as vital to Irish myth as is Odysseus to Greek, and his name just isn’t that hard to say correctly. I could say the same thing of dozens of other words butchered in this audiobook.

Apart from the mispronunciations, Bertish is actually a very good reader, but I found them disconcerting and distracting. I also wondered why an English actress was chose to read such an Irish book. None of the characters who she voices would have her posh accent or diction.

The novel itself is masterful. O’Brien is one of the most important contemporary Irish novelists. Her prose is dense and poetic and beautiful. This exquisite book is set in a small rural town in the West, and it follows the progress of star-crossed lovers and neighbors whose generations’ long feud rattles an entire community. It explores women’s rights and station in 1970s Ireland, changing mores, farming, property rights, legal vagaries, and a hundred other things. I will read it again and again, but I’ll stick to the voices in my own mind henceforth.

Available from Audible.com

Author: Sarah Waters

Reader: Simon Vance

Short Review: An intriguing, unusual gothic novel set in post-war England, read beautifully by Simon Vance. It’s intriguing and gorgeously written, and it asks more questions than it answers.

Long Review: With this novel, Waters takes a step away from her usual focus on sexuality and instead plays with questions of psychology, unreliable narrators, class, and mystery. The resulting novel is intriguing, but some readers may be frustrated by the lack of a clear resolution to the story.

The story opens as a country doctor pays a house call to the ailing maid in a crumbling estate house called Hundreds. Dr. Faraday insinuates himself into the daily life of the Ayers family, owners of Hundreds. He befriends eldest daughter Caroline Ayers, endears himself to Mrs. Ayers, and offers experimental treatments to Roderick, injured war veteran and only son. As the book progresses, Faraday’s presence begins to trouble Caroline and Roderick, and the reader begins to question Faraday’s motives.

Simon Vance is an excellent reader. His pacing is wonderful, his diction is clear, and his differentiation between characters is clear and easy to follow. Dr. Faraday is the speaker of the book, and Vance doesn’t make it clear whether or not we should trust the doctor. I love that Vance didn’t steer the listened towards one view or another in this novel. As some of the residents of Hundreds begin to believe the house is haunted, Vance doesn’t push us towards believing in the ghost or deciding that the supposed haunting is really a devious plot or a strange psychosis. He allows the mysterious to remain just that.

Available from Audible.com

Author: Philip Pullman

Reader: Anton Lesser

Warning! If you have not yet read The Shadow in the North, stop reading this review. There’s no way to review this book without giving spoilers for the previous book in the series.

Short Review: The third Sally Lockhart mystery continues Pullman’s engrossing story of a young Victorian woman, expertly read by Anton Lesser. This book delves further into questions of women’s and children’s rights in Victorian Britain and also examines worker’s and immigrant’s rights and antisemitism.

Long Review: This book opens three years after the last closes, and we find that Sally is now a mother to Fred’s child and grieving his death. Jim and Webster are out of the country, and Sally is living at a country house and still running her financial advisory business, now with the aid of a partner and a house staff. Sally is visited by a process server who serves her with divorce papers for a marriage she never engaged in, and as happens in this series, all hell breaks loose. This entire series is full of intrigue and danger, but I found this one the most frightening because the threat is against Sally, but also against her daughter Harriet, and Sally has so few people to help her and so few tools to aid her. It’s truly terrifying.

I found Pullman’s inclusion of the London Jewish community in the story incredibly interesting. I’m no expert on Jewish history, and the book made me want to study more. I love it when that happens. I am more familiar with British women’s history, particularly the history of Suffragists and other early women’s rights activists, so I found that aspect both comfortably familiar and very interesting.

Anton Lesser reads this book as fantastically as he read the two prior books in the series. The sense of desperation and drama tightens as the book progresses. He does a great job with the broadened array of accents and characters in this book. I cannot wait to listen to more books read by Lesser.

This book has been criticized for being overly political and for containing content that is inappropriate for young readers, as were the earlier books in the series. In this novel, I agree that Pullman puts too much emphasis on the political, which slows the book down a bit. I don’t think the book contains anything inappropriate for young adults though, particularly in light of the standard fare for teens available on TV and the web. For me, Pullman’s writing and Lesser’s reading are enough to bolster the weaker parts of the book.

A Sally Lockhart Mystery: The Shadow in the North

Available from Audible.com

Author: Philip Pullman

Reader: Anton Lesser

Short Review: The slightly-less brilliant sequel to The Ruby in the Smoke, read just as brilliantly by Anton Lesser.

Long Review: In the six intervening years between the first book in the series and this sequel, Sally has opened a financial consultancy business and Jim and Frederick have become private investigators. This books opens as a ship vanishes in the Baltic. Soon after, Sally becomes interested in the ship’s destruction when she learns that one of her clients lost a great deal of money she had invested in the shipping company whose ship went down. Sally begins investigating the shipping company in the hopes of returning her client’s money to her, while Jim and Frederick are asked to provide protection to a magician who claims to have knowledge of a murder. All hell breaks loose, of course.

I enjoyed this book, but I also saw some weaknesses in it. There are a couple of plot points that are a bit hard to swallow, but I don’t tend to focus much on that as long as they don’t apply to something I study personally. More importantly, Pullman definitely brings a political mindset to his work, and I can see how someone whose political views differed from the author’s would find that annoying. In the first novel of the series, Pullman criticizes colonialism, the opium wars and trade, and Victorian limits on women’s rights. I doubt many readers see his platforms as controversial. In this book, however, Pullman is examining the excesses of corporations and the growth of the military-industrial complex. I don’t find fault with his criticisms, but I’m much farther to the left than most Americans, so I also don’t see myself as representative on this subject.

The book also begins exploring Victorian sexual mores and it has a number of violent scenes. I’ve read a number of criticisms of this book based on the fact that a “young adult” novel depicts sexual relationships and/or violence. Here, I think the problem is really how publishers classify novels, not the content itself. Sally was 16 in the first book. She is 22 in this sequel, and no longer a minor by today’s definition. But some parents really don’t want their kids reading books that contain sex or violence, so they should how mature their young readers are before handing this audiobook over. I think that audiobooks can make certain things, including sex and violence, seem more intense than they would seem on the printed page. Lesser’s astounding skill as a reader intensifies such material even further, so the violence seems sharper and the sexiness sexier. I was fine with it, but I’m and adult and my Mom hasn’t monitored my choice in books since I was 10.

The Ruby in the Smoke

Available from Audible.com

Author: Philip Pullman
Reader: Anton Lesser

Short Review: A beautifully read story about a resourceful young woman who finds herself orphaned and embroiled in a deadly mystery.

Long Review: This first novel of a series is set in Victorian England, one of my favorite settings, and it follows a head-strong, resourceful young woman, my favorite sort of character. I’m a fan of Pullman’s, and I was bound to like this book. What surprised me though was how much I love the narrator. Lesser does an amazing job as reader. I know I have an obvious predilection for English readers, but Lesser is uncommonly good. He switches from character to character and accent to accent smoothly and believably. He alters his pitch and tone for different characters, but his voices for women aren’t those ludicrous falsettos that would bounce you out of the story. His natural pitch is in the tenor range, so he drops for men’s voices rather than climbing too much for women’s. It may not make much of a difference for some listeners, but for me his technique made the audiobook. In addition to his excellent accent and pitch work, his pacing and acting are wonderful throughout. The book was absolutely engrossing. I didn’t want it to end.

The book opens as Sally Lockhart goes to the office of her recently-deceased father, a shipping agent, to inquire about a note she received from his former business partner. Her brief conversation with an office worker named Jim lays the foundation for their friendship. Her conversation with her father’s Secretary Higgs leaves him dead on the floor. As the story progresses, questions about colonization, the opium trade, women’s rights, family, friendship, and betrayal all loom around Sally. As she delves into the mystery hinted at by the note, Sally reveals herself to be an uncommon young woman, and I loved rooting for her and the allies she draws to her side. This is a great start to an entertaining series.

Author: Diane Setterfield
Readers: Jill Tanner and Bianca Amato

Short Review: A gothic novel of intrigue about family history, fame, women, writing, truth, and secrets. It is read gorgeously by two readers who both have velvety, rich voices and lovely diction.

Long Review: The book opens in the voice of Margaret Lea, a bookseller and amateur biographer, who receives a letter from Vida Winter, a famous (fictional) English author. The pathologically secretive Winter asks Lea to write her biography. Lea has never read Winter’s novels, so she borrows a copy of Winter’s Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation from her father and discovers that it is one story short of thirteen. Captivated by Winter’s writing, Lea accepts the commission. As the story unfolds, Lea has to dig through fiction upon fiction to reach the truth of Winter’s life story, but also to rehash and reminisce about her own family history. Throughout the novel, the role of speaker switches back and forth between Winter and Lea.

This book is right up my alley. I love the author’s prose, both readers, the setting, the exploration of cultural mores and the roles of women, its bookishness, its pace. I think it’s masterful. I’ve listened to it a couple of times now. The mystery of it isn’t the thing for me anymore, of course. Now I’m looking at the architecture and trimmings, and I still love it.

Short Review: An intricate, beautiful, arguably overlong book beautifully read by a very talented narrator. This isn’t a book for everyone, but it was definitely a book for me.

Long Review: I decided to listen to this audiobook as part of 12 books in 12 months, a reading project floating out there in the blogosphere which encourages people to finally read at least a dozen of the books that have been haunting our shelves for ages. This one seemed apt, because I’d originally picked up a paper copy of Possession at the beginning of my graduate school program. At the time, I was too discouraged by how sad the protagonist’s life is at the outset. As a new grad student contemplating a transfer to a more fitting but probably less marketable program, it scared me away, and fast.

The book is very dense and incredibly detailed, and as I listened, I wavered between loving the layered detail and thinking Byatt should have edited out more and simplified the book. Possession follows a frustrated, underemployed, unpublished English Literature graduate student working on the (fictional) poet Randolph Henry Ash, who discovers some heretofore lost drafts of a letter to a woman. Roland becomes obsessed with tracking down the unnamed addressee and discovering the nature of his relationship to the woman Ash addressed. He meets Maud Bailey, a young professor and expert on the under-appreciated (and also fictional) poet Christabel LaMotte. The two contemporary academics studiously pick through letters and poems and search for lost or unknown correspondence, and end up uncovering wonderful connections between the historical writers and developing an interesting relationship of their own.

What’s fascinating about this book is how layered it is, and how much attention it pays to topics that are very dear to my heart. It delves into Breton and Scandinavian mythology, poetry, feminist theory, embroidery and knitting (though only touches of those, sadly), the nature of love, the nature of poetry, the nature of translation and retellings of myths (my nerdy heart sings!) . . . it’s so rich. One could argue that it’s too rich. Byatt gives us stories within stories within stories within stories. We get Ash and LaMotte’s letters to each other, wherein they discuss mythology and poetry. We get their original works, which are of course actually Byatt’s original works. We get so very much detail about the vagaries of modern academia, and the fights between feminist academics and “traditionalists.” It’s all just so very entwined.

Byatt was so brave to write this meta-romance. I honestly don’t know how she pulled it off. The greatest danger in works like this is that the supposed masterworks the characters are studying need to be excellent enough for the characters’ interest in them to seem just. Byatt does manage that, for the most part. As a writer and quasi-academic, I felt Byatt’s role so keenly. She wrote those pieces in a way that seemed so familiar to me. It’s odd to be a writer who works in a form and genre that is essentially lost to most readers. This book turned out to be such a fantastic outlet for many forms of the author’s creativity. I think I love it. I certainly love many aspects of it.

Virginia Leishman’s narration is one of the strongest aspects of the audiobook, and I think she truly saved the book for me. Whenever the details were too intricate or the infighting between the academics came too close to home, Leishman’s honeyed voice coaxed me back into the story. She truly has a gorgeous voice. Her diction is precise, her shifts from character to character are clear but not distracting, and her changes in accent reveal a great deal of acting and vocal skill. I will absolutely seek out more books she has narrated.

Short Review: A beautiful book, but difficult to listen to at times. Dr. Morrison is a wonderful reader in small doses, but perhaps should have handed this book over to a pro to read in its entirety.

Long Review: I’m one of those Morrison devotees, reading and re-reading her work, attending lectures and readings—a general obsessive. I studied her work thoroughly as a student, writing a thesis on Tar Baby and leading a class through Beloved. This is the first of Morrison’s books I’ve listened to, though I’ve read all of her fiction and most of her non-fiction. I love her compression of language, her ability to express intense, layered emotion and thought while writing in the non-standard English of communities that are often unfamiliar to the average reader of literary fiction. Morrison’s writing veers towards poetry again and again in most of her books. Ultimately, I think that’s what makes this book literally better on paper. It’s a fantastic book, but I prefer to read it with my eyes.

I don’t think it’s unusual that there’s a separation between the books I prefer to listen to and the books that I prefer to read on paper. Audiobooks are great for lighter books, and particularly for books with a clear narrative arc, at least for me. But when I want to read non-fiction or very dense fiction, I find that it’s frustrating to listen at someone else’s pace, and to miss that visual play of words on a page. When I read Morrison and other writers who use such a compressed style, I stop frequently to consider the last line or paragraph, re-reading as I go, and making sure I’ve puzzled through it all. That’s pretty tough to do with an audiobook, particularly if you listen on the go like I do.

A Mercy is set in 17th century colonial America. It follows Florens, a young girl born on a Portuguese-owned tobacco plantation who is sold as a young girl to a expunge a debt by her original owner. Separated from her mother, Florens comes into the care of landowner Jacob Vaark, his wife Rebekka, and their Native-American slave Lina. The book delves into the multi-racial slave system in play in the colonies, sexual mores, inter-religious strife, economics, betrayal, family, American history, relationships between women. Like most of Morrison’s books it’s thickly layered and meticulously researched.

Dr. Morrison reads her own work. I’m loathe to say this: I think it was a mistake. I’ve listened to Morrison read many times before, and one of her readings is a thing of wonder. But at a reading, she reads a short portion and then responds to questions, and reads another portion and responds to questions. She doesn’t need to read an entire book at such events, so weaknesses in her delivery don’t rankle. The best audiobook readers are great actors and great technicians of speech and pacing—for all of her genius, Morrison is neither of those things.

Despite my complaints, I love this book. I’m happy to have listened to it, and I did enjoy it. But I feel the audiobook only serves as an addition to the book on paper. I think just listening to the audiobook leaves the reader outside of the real story of A Mercy, and it’s absolutely a story worth reading. If you’re only going to read it once, read it on paper.

Short Review: This is absolutely a fantastic audiobook. When next I need to convince someone that audiobooks are worth considering, I’ll recommend this book first. It’s gorgeously written, and beautifully read. Moreover, it’s a book that truly matters.

Long Review: I feel like I gush too much when I review audiobooks here, in part because I’m much more likely to knuckle down and write reviews for the really great audiobooks I listen to. The mediocre ones leave me sad and listless and I’m loathe to criticize the work of writers and readers who didn’t quite get it right. The truly bad ones–those I abandon.

This, however, is one of the best audiobooks I’ve ever listened to. It’s the perfect combination of reader, type of story, and quality of writing. I feel almost as if someone studied my brain and designed an audiobook that I would fall madly in love with, and then produced it. Except that any attempt at that would fail horribly, and this book is just too exquisite. It’s beautiful, and heart-rending, and funny, and well-researched, and clever, and important, and informative, and and and . . . I love it.

That said, it’s seriously sad in parts. I’m not generally bothered by that, but I did consider it before diving in. Thankfully, it’s also funny and uplifting and thoroughly true, in the way only excellent fiction can be true.

The main character of the book is Liesel Meminger, a young German girl who, right at the beginning of the story, becomes a stealer of books. Hence the title. The speaker, and I’m not spoiling anything with this, is death. Liesel is a fosterling, raised by the Hubermanns, a working class couple. The story begins before WWII and continues through the years of the war, as the Hubermanns wrestle with the place of ethical people in a terribly unethical state.

The paper book is fantastic, and well worth reading. But the audiobook, oh the audiobook. The audiobook is read by an absolute master. Allan Corduner is a musician as well as an actor, and he’s also both Jewish and openly gay, which I think gives him particular incite into the subject matter of the book. He has the timing, and diction, and delivery abilities of a great actor. He has the sense of music a talented musician brings. But he also has that all-too-heavy personal connection to Jewish survivors of WWII. I’m sure another great actor could have done a good job with this book, but I can’t think of anyone who would have done quite so well.

Middlesex: A Novel

Available from Audible.com

Author: Jeffrey Eugenides
Reader: Kristoffer Tabori

Short Review: A novel I absolutely love, full of gorgeous language, beautifully-rendered characters, and entrancing history and myth. Tabori’s reading is downright fantastic, and Eugenides remains one of the most talented writers of his generation. This is one of the best books I’ve ever read or listened to.

Long Review: I read this book on paper several years ago and found it absolutely fascinating. Eugenides treats his subject matter with a great deal of tenderness and honesty, never turning towards the louche or sensational.

For those who’ve missed the hype: the protagonist of Middlesex is a hermaphrodite who is raised as a girl and then chooses to live as a man upon discovering the nature of his unusual condition. That’s not a spoiler–the book opens with this very information. The book is about genetics, the nature of love and family, the natures of human sexuality and gender (which are two different things), Smyrna, Greek-Americans, silk, the foundation of the Nation of Islam, Detroit, racial relations . . . it’s about many fascinating things. It is so engrossing because Caliope/Cal is a true work of art. Eugenides knows how to build a character. He richly deserved that Pulitzer.

Because I loved the paper book so much, I was a bit worried about picking up the audiobook. It drives me batty when someone reads a book I love in the wrong voice for my head. Thankfully, I could listen to Tabori read the phonebook. I wasn’t familiar with him prior to this book, but I look forward to hearing more of his work. Tabori switches comfortably between the voices of many characters, from the basement-deep Jimmy Zizmo to the quavering, fragile Desdemona-as-grandmother. He plays the characters well, but doesn’t push it too far. He’s clearly playing Cal playing the other characters, rather than trying to leave his roll as first-person narrator for those other characters.

In part, the book is so successful because Eugenides is such a careful researcher. Descriptions of Smyrna, silk production, the birth of the US car industry, prohibition, Turkey, genetics, gender reassignment, and many other topics all ring true. Without that underlying research, the book would fall apart. I finished the book with a list of things I wanted to research and a real sense of wonder about Smyrna in particular.

Overall, I think the most surprising thing about Middlesex is its humor. If you describe this book or The Virgin Suicides to someone who isn’t familiar with Eugenides’ work, they’ll assume both stories are weighty, heartbreaking tragedies. In fact, both stories are so engaging because they’re so drenched in wit and humor. Cal, in particular, is charmingly self-effacing and funny. He’s not self-pitying, he doesn’t chastise his relatives for his treatment or his condition. He recognizes the absurdity of humanity itself, as should we all.