Skinwalker

Jane Yellowrock, Book 1

By: Faith Hunter

Narrated by: Khristine Hvam

Length: 14 hrs and 29 mins

Publisher's summary

Jane Yellowrock is the last of her kind - a skinwalker of Cherokee descent who can turn into any creature she desires and hunts vampires for a living. But now she's been hired by Katherine Fontaneau, one of the oldest vampires in New Orleans and the madam of Katie's Ladies, to hunt a powerful rogue vampire who's killing other vamps.

©2009 Faith Hunter (P)2010 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

• Audie Award Nominee - Judges' Award for Best Paranormal Audiobook, 2011

"A new, strongly unique voice in the dark fantasy genre." (Kim Harrison)

"Hunter's very professionally executed, tasty blend of dark fantasy, mystery, and romance should please fans of all three genres." ( Booklist)

"Khristine Hvam portrays Jane with an adventurous-sounding voice edged with a twang.... Hvam’s voices for the Louisiana locals whom Jane learns to love and respect.... augment an intriguing story with hints of Native American mysticism." ( AudioFile)

GREAT LISTEN WITHOUT ALL OF THE SWEARING

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

I love this series!! It is so nice to listen to a book without all of the swearing that is added to other books and to not have all of the explicit sex scenes. This books are very easy to listen to, I have purchased all of the series from audible and am on my last book that is available. Very sad to not have another one right now.

What did you like best about this story?

Not a lot of swearing and explicit sex!!!!!

Fantastic story and better narration!

This is a great book! I love the no apologies style of writing that the author uses. She wrote the story exactly the way she wanted to, and readers can take it or shake it. Love it! The character of Jane was such a great character! So stereotypical, but at the same time, so honest and believable. I loved this book! The plot was so far fetched, and so "out there", but I honestly didn't care. The narrator helped this book a lot as well. She was amazing! To me, the chosen narrator for an audio book is SUPER important, and Ms. Hunter hit the nail on the head with this one! Can't wait for the next in the series!

Great character!

I enjoyed Skinwalker because of the development of the main character. She is fascinating and has a bit of humor without laugh-out-loud jokes that would not fit the book at all. I was excited to get information about who Jane Yellowrock was even though it happened a little at a time through the book. The narration fit the character including where she came from, and none of the narration distracted me from listening.

The only reason I deducted a star from the story was not necessarily a fault of the book so much as it was a problem for me. I had a hard time keeping up with the plethora of character names. To make it worse, some of them also had nicknames, which, instead of adding to the character, made it harder to remember which character was which. This certainly will not make me drop the series, but it will make me concentrate more next time on securing names to characters in my mind.

Overall, I very much enjoyed this mystery and its resolution.

Everything and more in the book

Is more than exceeded my expectations I got this book on sale and I am definitely getting the next one in the series I am so I can pass. I think that the most memorable point in the book was where that they get a lot between the beef and Jane theytell such an interesting relationship it's a definite must listen to it went by far too quickly. I am just glad that there is another book in the series that I can listen to right now

Two words: Mary Sue

The main character of this book feels a bit like a Mary Sue. She can dance, she's a bad ass vamp killer, she's hot and desired by almost every man (and a few of the ladies) she encounters. That being said, it was still a good story. It took a bit for me to really get into it, but once we started learning a little about Jane's past, it got a LOT better. Khristine Hyam gives a wonderful voice to not only Jane, but the other characters as well.

loved it

I've read this series multiple times, and am really enjoying hearing it too! Great story and characters, and well performed!

Learn how to pronounce regional words!

I love the story. Love the characters. Faith Hunter is a wonderful writer. But how did she allow K Hvan to botch all the regional names, street names and references for New Orleans? Hvan is a great reader but didn’t do any homework on this. Where are the editors? Herbert is pronounced “ A- Bear” not “ her- Bert”, Chartres St is pronounced “chart-Er “ not “ Cha-tee-es”, but the worst: lake Ponchartrain. It’s pronounced “ pon - cha- train”. She said “pon CHAR tee rain.
Just make me wince so many times. Narrators need to learn how to pronounce regional dialects and pronunciations. That’s called preparation for the role. It’s sad that so many narrators ignore that.

What a Great New Paranormal Character!

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

This would be a great book to any of my friends who love paranormal books. This is not the typical vampires and werewolves story. So this would be a change of pace for those friends.

What other book might you compare Skinwalker to and why?

I couldn't really compare this to any other books. It's a cross between Kim Harrison's Rachael Morgan novels and Spencer Quinn's Chet and Bernie novels. Because you have a paranormal hunter with a dash of a non-human talker, such as Chet the dog.

What about Khristine Hvam’s performance did you like?

She was perfect except once and a while you could tell when she stopped reading and restarted later as it was recorded.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

This would be a difficult book to film since so much of it is done internally through thoughts..

Any additional comments?

If you love the paranormal this is a good one, you just have to listen for yourself.

I'm happy I bought this.

I'm happy that I bought this book and really enjoyed it. but it was just a little difficult at times listening to how "the big cat's" thought were spoken, not the narrator's fault but the authors.
Excellent narrator.

Enjoyable

Took me two tries to finish this one but i think that was due to not being in the mood for this type of book the first time. Once i gave it a second try I really enjoyed it.