Kim

This story was great, although not nearly as gripping as Paladin of Souls and Curse of Chalion. 1) The narrator was female but the main character was male, and although annoying, I could deal with that. 2) The narrator's speech pattern was terrible. She paused in the middle of sentences instead of reading them smoothly, as if she thought our little brains needed time to catch up with what she was saying. It was like she couldn't get out more than 4 or 5 words without drawing breath. Thankfully her breathing wasn't apparent. Listening to her was pure torture sometimes. I won't be jumping to listen to more of her.

I didn't know anything about the characters involved, so I didn't have any emotional connection to them from the outset. Might have helped if I had. Otherwise, it was just a tedious reading of what seemed like someone's writing class assignment... "Here, write a diary-format monologue from a woman's point of view...Go!" I could appreciate the work, but did not enjoy it as I previously have a true novella or full-length story told from first-person.

Although I enjoyed the story overall and the narrator was quite good, there were points in the book where things just dragged on and on and on... It could have been a much shorter story with just as much impact.

No, I rarely listen to books more than once.

It seemed a natural conclusion to the story. Nothing earth-shattering. More like the end of an episode if this were a tv show.

No.

This is a fun read, good for a road trip when you don't want anything heavy to think about or pay attention to. The characters are entertaining, if a bit contrived. The narrator does a decent job of differentiating voices, and I swear Oberon is by far the best.

I listened to this in 2007, and never bought the other books in this series. Recently a friend of mine let me know that HBO was going to do a series based on these books, so I downloaded GoT again to get a refresher. I LOVE THIS STORY, but now I know why I never went any further. The English narrator does a fantastic job with older men, grizzled soldiers, and the like. But when it comes to portraying the women and youths in the story he fails miserably. They all end up sounding like some terrible version of my 90-yr-old grandmother, or they end up sounding whiney and petulant. Ugh. I'm going to finish the novel, but I'm sorely disappointed in the quality of the narrator.

Although I understand the concept of attempting to bring the themes/feeling of old fairy tales into a modern-day world, de Lint failed utterly to bring me into the world he tried to create or bring me to like the characters. I like de Lint, but I simply could not wait for these stories to be over so that I could move on to some other book. Disappointing.

The story was good, and a couple of voices (accents) the narrator used were ok, but he sounds like he's talking with his head in a bucket, even on the higher-quality download.