Barbara

This is the story of 3 siblings who as young adults are involved to one degree or another in the accidental death of a 10-year-old child. They all carry her with them ('carry the one') as they grow into their lives. One, an artist, does her finest work painting "portraits" of the child as she grows through the life the artist imagines for her. Another, an asrophysicist, plunges deeper and deeper into drug abuse and despair. This was a richly imagined tale, and the narrator was superb. (She has a charming little lateral lisp, not always present, which gives her a youthful adorable-ness).

The gimmick is that the earth starts revolving more slowly, so that days and nights become unnaturally elongated. The wobbling of the earth becomes a metaphor for middle school, where kids become aware of time, see the cracks and tensions in their parents' marriages, feel thre first pangs of love, etc. The emotional life of an 11-year old was not enough to sustain this dystopian apocalyptic novel.

the narrator does a superb job of conveying the precocious eleven-year-old protagonist, Flavia. the plot was predictable, rather like vintage Agatha Christie or Nancy Drew, but the setting in a mouldering English country house and the first-person narration by the exasperating and delightful Flavia made this a captivating bit of holiday escapism.

Definitely. Almost did.

My brother-in-law recommended Val McDermid to me, so I downloaded this, the first in the Hill-Jordan series. I almost stopped reading it because of the graphic descriptions of gruesome and sadistic tortures. I did finish the book, though, and even bought another, in the hope that maybe the author would realize that she didn't need to make her murders so graphic in order to write a gripping thriller. Overall, I enjoyed the book, and am looking forward to seeing whether the author gets better.

Very skillful performance -- almost too much so. Hopefully without giving too much away,...the performance made it easy to guess at the identity of the villain.

This performance was so vivid that it brought the story, set in the 1960s, absolutely to life. The book was not perfect; the ending was a little unsatisfying, and some of the characters were cutouts or not realized as fully as they could be, but the narration of the roles of Skeeter, Celia, Aibilene and Minny was outstanding. I am probably the last woman to read this book, but now I want to see the movie to see if the actors could possibly be as good.

Like a mobius strip, the plot has infinite twists, doubling back on itself. Even though it was by no means hidden who "the Snowman" was from the start, there were enough highly visual and inventive twists to keep the reader absorbed.

With the popular Scandinavian mystery writers (Larsson, Mankell, Nesbo, etc.) it can be a challenge both to pronounce proper names and place names convincingly and at the same time not confuse the mostly anglophone reader. This narrator got it just right.

this was a noir detective yarn, set in pre-war Germany. I was hoping for something like Alan Furst, but on the contrary, the characters were cutouts, the villains predictable, and the narration cringeworthy. Gratuitous violence, too.

No

This was one of the finest narrations I have heard. The reader does accents and intonations so convincingly that you can't imagine it any other way.

Wonderful interlocking plots

no, but I intend to seek out others

tough question. Baby O, Ali or Bannon

This is one of my all time favorites, and I have listened to thousands of books.

Great narration by the author. The book is an entertaining but oddly forgettable string of random facts and factoids, loosely strung on the idea of rooms in the author's house, but ridiculously wide ranging: a plague of locusts in Wyoming; the Crystal Palace exhibition in London in 1851; the reason the dining room was developed; bats; Palladio.