The Shadow of Saganami

By: David Weber

Narrated by: Jay Snyder

Length: 30 hrs and 53 mins

Publisher's summary

The Star Kingdom has a new generation of officers! And this elite group hand-picked and trained by Honor Harrington herself is going to be needed immediately, as their first assignment turns out to be more dangerous than anyone expected.

What was supposed to be a quiet outpost, far from the blazing conflict between the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the People's Republic of Haven has actually been targeted by an unholy alliance between the slaveholders of Manpower, the rival star kingdoms of Mesa and Monica, and the bureaucrats of the Solarian League.

The alliance stands to benefit if the Havenites defeat Manticore, and are preparing for a surprise attack from the rear to divide Manticore's forces, which are already strained nearly to their limits. With their captain, the young Manticoran officers will risk their careers, if not their lives, on an unauthorized mission to expose and counter the threat to their Star Kingdom. Follow their journey as they show what they're made of.

New York Times best-selling author David Weber begins a new series that will be a must-buy for the hundreds of thousands of Honor Harrington fans.

©2005 David Weber (P)2009 Audible, Inc.

Yikes! The female voices!

The narrator's female voices are just horrible. All the women sound like hystrionic old women having the vapors.

Jay Snyder is a poor choice for this series, especially considering that Weber's books have as many competent, cool, commanding women as men. It's a constantly jarring disconnect.

great story. uneven narration.

awesome story. Weber's writing is captivating as always. Narrator does an excellent job on narrator passages and male character dialogue but the female dialogue is horrendous. not sure if I was listening to an 8 year old boy doing a puppet show or John Cleese in a Monty Python skit.

Great book with somewhat flawed narrator.

Great book, narrator also good except for his inability to do female voices (lots of female characters in the book). If you listen at higher speeds it gets really annoying at times.

Shadow of Saganami

Great Book in itself and good listen, didn't like Jay Snyder reading because he wasn't very good at doing the the female voice and in these series of books, you have more female voice parts than males, which is why i rated only a 4 instead of 5. this Book starts the Talbot Sector story and does a wonderful job of it as usual :) David Weber gets a 5 every time in my book.

Great Book

Love how the book ties in with the Honor H. stories. shows their is more happening in the universe.

Good overall; could've been better

First thing I want to say is that Jay Snyder, while not a particularly bad narrator/voice actor, REALLY needs to come up with a different way of distinguishing women from men in his performance. This is mostly a subjective thing, but I skipped over multiple parts on my second time listening because his "falsetto means female" performance annoyed me so much. There's also no attempt at continuity between his and Allyson Johnson's performances of the main series (though I much prefer Snyder's version of White Haven, tbh), so be prepared for that. Ginger Louis having a "R.P." British accent in place a of a southern drawl was especially jarring to me personally.

All that aside, Jay Snyder really does a good job overall, and not all of his female performances completely suck. Things do get a little shakey here and there, with a few instances of accents being dropped or swapped, and it sounds like the epilogue was recorded much later, or before everything else, as multiple names are pronounced incorrectly. in the end, however, I still found myself moved by his performance, especially his ability to use the tone of his voice to really drive home the emotional and psychological content of a scene, even without actual dialogue.

Plotwise, I feel like Weber could have given half as much "screen time" to the villains, politicians, and their boardroom discussions and still have had the audience understand what was going on well enough to preserve the dramatic irony throughout. However, if you've stuck with the mainline novels up to this point, you're probably already used/resigned to that aspect of Weber's writing, and to be fair, none of it is what I would call poorly written or wholly detrimental to the story. It just feels like too many pit-stops along the way to bigger and better things, and I certainly became impatient to hear what was going on with the middies and their Captain more than once.


As with all Honorverse stories, major character death warnings are potentially in effect, and don't get too attached to any named POV character who shows up out of the blue in the middle of a battle. ;)

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(also, the original text might include a difference in spelling which legitimizes Snyder's pronunciation, but I'm pretty damn sure that it's "GOSS-HAWK," not "GO-SHOCK")

Complicated political backstory to past events

A too long story with too many players diluting the character dev that is aretelling event already passed by the main storyline yields a skipable book.

Good story, bad narration.

What made the experience of listening to The Shadow of Saganami the most enjoyable?

Making Terakov (sp?) sound like Captain Picard.

What was one of the most memorable moments of The Shadow of Saganami?

The [SPOILER] at the end. I teared up at work listening to it.

How did the narrator detract from the book?

HOLY SHIT THE LADY VOICES. KILL THEM WITH FIRE. It's like the narrator was mocking the very idea of women. (The lady voices in Storm from the Shadows are a little less bad.) Other than the lady voices the guy was actually pretty good. And all the Manticorans having British accents, that was weird. I got so used to the main story narrator's way of saying Honorverse-specific things.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

It's 31 hours long, so...no.

Any additional comments?

The publisher's summary lies. There's no elite group of midshippeople hand chosen by Honor Harrington, it's just a handful of middies on their "snotty" cruise.

voice acting

voice actor(s) for female voices, voice actor(s) for male voices. His voice was really grating for one of the female characters early on, but it got better as the book progressed. I'd just as soon have one other voice actor to handle half the voices .

Great story, bad narration.

Loved the story. Narrator made me cringe every single time he tried to voice a female character. I had a really hard time getting through this. The story was the only thing that let me power through the narration.