Alison

I love this series and this title is particularly good, but the narrator needs work. There's a group called The Vigilant Vegetarians which the narrator keeps saying "viligant" - no such word!

I love the poem Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight with a kind of ironic fondness for its melodrama. So I bought this recording. First; there are multiple announcements for the website of the producing company. Why?
Then, the production starts with 2 verses of Curfew, followed at once by 2 verses of Towser. Huh?
Finally it starts all over again and you hear all of Curfew, then all of Towser (after another website announcement!)
Once you really get to the poetry, it's ok though Towser is narrated in a most un-Kansas-like accent.

This is a wonderful epistolary tale, about the home front during WW 2 in England's West Country. Henrietta is a doctor's wife, with a grown son and daughter both doing their bit for the war. Lady B is a great sympathetic character and Faith finally settles down.

Book One, Henrietta's War, is unfortunately not available (yet) on Audible; that's where you meet the characters and get the setting for the books. I have read both books, but I think that someone coming fresh to the series might miss a bit, having only book 2 available.

The reader does a very good job of presenting Henrietta's voice to us - I liked her cheerful sign off to each letter (your childhood's friend, Henrietta).

The plot of this book is one of my favorites - I'm so glad that Audible is bringing out some of Barbara Hambly's fine fantasies in audio (now where's Time of the Dark!)

I found Ms Linden's performance oddly robotic. Each word is so clearly enunciated as to be almost a parody of text-to-speech. She does loosen up a bit later into the book but the pauses before unfamiliar words (Altiokis, Rind, etc.) break up the flow. It's too bad because her voice is pleasantly pitched and nice to listen to.

Yes. I've read this book many times and the audio is a great enhancement.

The scene in Kew Gardens, where the family deal with grief by enjoying the beauty of the lapageria vine.

Where Rose and her mother visit Constance and Rosamund for the first time, with exciting results.

This book has so much depth - it's wonderful in its details about music and education; it's a great family story; everything I say is only one facet of the plot. Well worth reading and listening to!

It would have been better to have Katherine Kellgren narrate The Last Leaf, with its 2 women characters, and to have one of the men narrate the story about Soapy. (And I didn't care for the way the narrator voiced Della in Gift of the Magi.) But it was a lovely present!