Anna Browning

I liked this a great deal. The story was fresh, the dialogue was hilarious, and Wil Wheaton's performance was stellar. The ending seemed far-fetched, which is slightly ludicrous considering how much suspension of disbelief I'd used up until that point. I can still recommend this strongly, and I do.

When Pride and Prejudice and Zombies came out, I was excited. I was giddy with the thought that two of my beloved favorites would mesh, much like the pairing of peanut butter and chocolate, into a wonderful new creation. Insert face palm. Sherri Browning Erwin manages the feat: she seamlessly blends the paranormal into Bronte's classic tale in such a way that, if I didn't know better, I'd imagine that it had always been this way.

Well, now. This is a happy surprise! I despair upon occasion that there are no more paranormal rocks to be overturned, no fresh narratives, no new worlds to discover, and, boy, do I like to be proven wrong. This has everything I like in a book: it's funny, engaging, expects me to have a brain, and did I mention it's funny? And not just because there's a talking dog, although, hey - that's always funny. Looking forward to returning to this version of the world.

Fans of the Sookie Stackhouse novels should love Angel Crawford, a small-town Louisiana gal with a slight problem dealing with her new condition as one of the living impaired. Angel is far from derivative, however. She's a likable character who lives in a world that has suddenly become very, very different, thanks to her recent aforementioned living impairment. While this is a debut novel, and, as such, has to create the world and introduce it and its occupants, My Life as a White Trash Zombie is both engaging and fun. I look forward to the next entries in the series.

As a Discworld fan, I delight in Pratchett's prose and plotting. "Dodger" did not disappoint. A lovely visit to Victorian England is marred ever so slightly by inauthentic winks to history and literature, but Stephen Briggs' narration is delightful, and this is certainly worth a listen.

I *think* I quite like this book. It's hard to tell, however, because every conversation takes place three times. This might be alright if I were reading it, but, as a listener, I'm trapped. Suddenly nothing happens. These prolonged conversations serve to bring the plot to a standstill.

The first half of the audiobook should, by rights, take half the time. The narration is repetitious, and seems to imply that the reader or, in this case, the listener is dense. This is an editing issue and should have been dealt with before the book was released.

I like the story, I like the characters. I'd like action to occur. The narrator is doing a fine job, for the most part. He's doing quite well on most of the voices. Considering the number of characters, it's nigh onto impossible to get them all distinct. Some of the female voices suffer from the Monty Python-esque falsetto. Like most fantasy novels, female characters make up, perhaps, fifteen per cent of the population, so this isn't much of an issue.

At this point, I sincerely doubt that I'll look into the other books in the series because this feels like it's happening in real time. Each day is filled with needless detail, repetitious dialogue and interior monologues.