A Girl and Five Brave Horses

By: Sonora Carver

Narrated by: Andrea Giordani

Length: 6 hrs and 13 mins

Publisher's summary

Sonora Carver (1904-2003) was a circus entertainer and one of the first female horse divers. In the arresting autobiography A Girl and Five Brave Horses, Sonora tells her life story. Her sensational act was mounting a running horse as it reached the top of a 40-foot or 60-foot tower and sailing down on its back as it plunged into an 11-foot pool of water below. In 1931, she was blinded due to hitting the water off balance with open eyes while diving her horse. After the accident, she continued to dive horses until 1942. The film Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken is loosely based on her life.

Public Domain (P)2020 Museum Audiobooks

A wonderful story!!

Such a great story and so well written. The reader is great. I was surprised to hear an English accent for the very American author.
I loooooved the story!!

Amazing Story

Amazing story, with terrible narration. Audible errors and an odd english/German accent for a biography about a southern woman. I still highly recommend for the story of an amazing life.

Great story, poor narration

The story is wonderful, but it deserves a new narration and proper editing of the performance. I have listened to many audio books, and this is the first time I have heard notable errors in narration. grunts and restarts of the line on 2 occasions, background coughing, lines read twice... was it edited at all?

For a story that is pure Americana, the choice of a British voice artist was a poor one. On top of that, the occasional pronunciation of the work "dive" as "drive" in a book about diving horses and the inconsistent pronunciation of AL Carver's name - Awl, Owl, Al, Hal - was grating.

Good story but the narrator was terrible

The story was entertaining enough that I bought it for my granddaughters. The narrator Bob not due the book justice

Inconsistent accent

It was strange to use a non American accent for an American character and story

Great Story, Terrible Reader

The story is great and anyone who’s seen Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken will love it. However, the reader has an accent that comes and goes, seeming sometimes British and sometimes German. This is not only annoying but problematic since Sonora was Southern, and the reader pronounces several words wrong to the point where some of them are nearly incomprehensible. Moreover, the editing was very poorly done. There are bits where there are repeated words akin to a vinyl record skip and several bits where the reader sighs or starts to make a comment to someone in the recording room. It’s very jarring and if the story wasn’t so intriguing I’d honestly have never made it through this book.

Poor choice of narrator, but great story

Narrator a strange mix of British, Irish, South African and Colonial India to be reading a story with significant pieces of Americana. Didn’t care for the reader and her but here pronunciation of ‘pedestal, and Yosemite,’ but if you’ve seen the movie, you’ll like the book 10X more!

Awesome story, mediocre performance

This autobiography is wonderful: gripping, succinct, and entertaining. However the choice of narrator is bizarre. Sonora Carver was American and yet a British person, for whom English may even be a secondary language, was chosen. Her overall tone and inflection was good but there were many obvious mispronunciations of regular words as well as well-known American place names.

good story

what an interesting life! I've wanted to get hold of this book for a while so I was happy to find it on audible. my only complaint is that while it was read well, the narrator's accent was slightly off putting and her pronunciation of some words very strange. I kept mentally correcting and was pulled out of the story for it.

Charming book - Worst Reader Ever!

I absolutely loved this book, but I had to give up listening to it on my ride to work everyday and just read it in my own. For some bizarre reason, they chose to have a woman with a thick European/Italian accent read an autobiography about an American woman's life as a horse diver. That in itself was already very confusing and off-putting. I tried to get past that, but unfortunately she didn't read well at all and I couldn't even understand her most of the time. Ugh!!