Fire and Steel

By: Anita Mills

Narrated by: Sandra Caldwell

Length: 13 hrs and 19 mins

Publisher's summary

Forced to wed the daring Norman lord Guy of Rivaux, proud and beautiful young Catherine de Brione vowed never to give him her heart. Catherine was sure she loved dashing Brian FitzHenry, who had held her in thrall since childhood. But she had no inkling of the fire her bridegroom could rouse within her. As the turmoil of intrigue and battle, danger and deception erupt around her in 11th century Normandy, Catherine finds that the daring and passionate man she was so eager to leave is now the man she can't bear to lose.

©1988 Anita Mills (P)2014 Audible Inc.

Critic reviews

"Skillful... unexpected plot twists keep the reader turning pages." (Publisher's Weekly)

Sweeping medieval saga continues ...

This is my second reading of Fire series and this book is still my least favourite, purely because I really disliked main heroine,
She is spoiled, self centred and full of her own consequence, it was hard not to be irritated every time she had a speaking part.

Saying that, Fire and Steel is still beautifully written five stars story and even unlikable heroine didn’t diminish my enjoyment and I couldn’t stop listening until the very end.

Don’t understand the critics of the narrator, in my opinion, she did a fantastic job.

Overall, fantastic listen, highly recommend.

Good story

This was a good read, the heroine was too much of a brat but over all good story and excellent narration

Awful narrator spoils the story

I tried the first book in the series 3 times but never got beyond more than 5 min of listening because the narrator is terrible. I'm determined to power through this one.

Why is the narrator so unsatisfactory? First of all, it is strange to have a narrator with an American accent narrate a tale of Medieval England and France. Then the delivery itself, which is absolutely flat. There is no distinction between the narrative and dialog, nor between the different characters. Her young girls sound like 50 yr old women. Ms. Caldwell's pronunciation of the few French words is execrable. You would have thought she could have made some effort to find out how they are pronounced. Additionally, she insists on pronouncing the chief villain's name "Belleme" when in actuality it's Belesme. Her dismal performance in the Fire series, unfortunately, could not be attributed to her inexperience, since these are the last ones credited to her as Sarah Caldwell (apparently she also narrates under the name Aimee Jolson). At this point, I've listened to over a hundred different narrators and I regret to say that Ms. Caldwell ranks in the bottom 1%. I can only conclude that Ms. Caldwell has no real interest in being an audiobook narrator since she obviously hadn't bothered with doing any homework before she plowed through the book, showing no hint that she even knew what she was reading. A narrator like Nicholas Boulton shows more animation when reading the phone book than Ms. Caldwell.

Except to say that I have enjoyed Anita Mill's storytelling when narrated by other performers, I can't really critique this particular story based on Ms. Caldwell's rendition. It's too bad because it's hard to find interesting Medieval romances with sufficient historical details to hold my attention.