Chad

This is a great traditional classic with a wealth of information about a distant culture and context. Filled with information and adventure. But the narration is a big problem. The reader delivers every sentence with a very artificial and insensitive pattern of pauses, emphasis and speeds--as if it were all poetry. Much of the book is dialogue and each character has exactly the same intonation--you can listen to huge chunks and eventually only some feature of the content tells you who is speaking--and the content you need takes a long time to pick up because the sentences are all being broken down into little chunks by the unchanging style of reading. It makes an exciting story intolerably boring by the end.

This was a disappointing story especially after listening to A Fine Balance. However, the narration by Martin Jeeves was excellent.