Rachel Kapila

I'm not even going to talk about P&P here. It's Pride and Prejudice. It's awesome. We all know this.
This is about the narrator. Flo Gibson is not the sort of narrator we have come to expect in the modern age of audiobooks. We expect, these days, professional actors who have been chosen because the quality of their voice matches that of the story or the main character. This is an old recording, one of many narrated by Flo Gibson that I heard on tape as a child. She read me Wind in the Willows, all of Jane Austen, Wuthering Heights, a lot of Dickens, the Secret Garden, The Jungle Book, and Black Beauty. I get why people are writing reviews slamming her narration, I do. But to me, she is a grandmotherly figure who read to me for my entire childhood, and if you want to take advantage of the inexpensive audiobooks of her that still exist, that's how you need to think of her too. She's generally not going to sound like you think the characters sound, and as far as I know, she's not really an actor. Her voice doesn't resonate like Jim Dale's and she isn't going to do all the great accents like Davina Porter, and she simply isn't going to sound like what you have come to expect from an audiobook narrator.
But the recordings are pretty cheap usually, and it can be nice to just be read aloud to by your honorary grandmother Flo Gibson.

I spent years trying to find this book, googling entire phrases I remembered until one day it turned up. It's just as quirky and fun as I remember, and the narrator does a fantastic job with all the different characters in the eccentric, brilliant Bagthorpe family.
I wondered if my boys would like it, or if it would seem dated to them, but they love it.