The Kingdoms and the Elves of the Reaches

By: Robert Stanek

Narrated by: uncredited

Length: 5 hrs and 4 mins

Publisher's summary

After the Great War that divided the peoples, the kingdoms of men plunged into a Dark Age that lasted 500 years. To heal the lands and restore the light, the great kings decreed that magic and all that is magical, be it creature, man, or device, shall be cleansed to dust. The cleansing raged for so long that no human could recall a time without it and it is in this time that the Dark Lord Sathar returned from the dark beyond. The one hope of the peoples of Ruin Mist was Queen Mother, the elf queen of old. She saw a way out of everlasting darkness, a path that required the union of the divided peoples. And so it began.

Listen to more books in The Kingdoms and the Elves of the Reaches series.

©2002 Robert Stanek (P)2005 Reagent Press

Critic reviews

"[A] complex tale...sure to attract fans of graphic novels and classic Tolkien alike....Stanek will likely draw a cult following....This cliffhanger guarantees fans, and those fans will be ready to wield their swords against the Dark Lord in Stanek's next installment." (Voice of Youth Advocates)

Lousy Narrator

I beleive this book is much better than it comes across in audio. The narrator uses a flat monitone throughout without so much as a pause between paragraphs to let the "reader" know that it's a new thought. It was like one 5 hour run on sentence and extremely disconcerting. My teenage son had the same assessment.

Bad in many ways.

Derivative and inelegantly written with annoying narrative style it exemplifies many of the worst traits of epic fantasy.

Highly Recommended

This is the SciFi Editor's Top Pick and ours. The story is a pleasure to listen to. Not only is it one of the more enjoyable books we've found, it is the only one we've every agreed on in the car. I am an avid reader of fantasy, scifi and mystery, and would place this one near the top. I can't recommend this book strongly enough, though I would say I found the first few chapters less interesting than the remainder.

Very dissapointed

I don't know why everyone said this book was so good. It was hard to follow. By the end, not much had happended. And the narrator just droned. I kept having to wake myself up to follow the story

read along

I can't believe this was narrated by the author! One would think an author would make it as exciting as possible, but this reading is annoying to listen to - fluctuations in volume, odd voices for characters, no audible break between changes of scenes - sounds like he connects every word together with an underlying drone. I do have published copies of the 4 books in the series, and may listen again to the first one with book in hand. However, although the story seems decent enough, I will not purchase the other Audible books in this series because the audio version is so terrible.

Also Unimpressed

I agree with fethin's review of June 7th. This is only the 2nd book I have failed to finish. I only got through about 1/4 of the book. The story may be different if you read it yourself, but I found the story to be stuttered and difficult to follow the character transitions from one to the other as the story continued. I was VERY unimpressed with the narrator. I don't see his name listed in the description. I looked for it so I could avoid it in the future. He doesn't seem to have emotion in his reading. It was almost monotone. Sometimes he would slip and I could hear some natural emotion, but that only lasted a minute or so then he'd go back to his sing-song sounding reading. I may try to listen to it again sometime in the far future (now that I have the recording), but I'll have to be pretty desperate with nothing else going at the time.

Not a bad story

I've just finished the first book, so my opinion may change as time goes on, but I think the comparisons to "Lord of the Rings" are as overblown as some of the prose passages in the book.

The story jumps around a lot, and I think the narrator could have done a much better job of changing tone and timbre to indicate jumps in time or between characters. It's not all his fault, though; there were some transitions that left me wondering if my iPod Shuffle had skipped a section (it has trouble with bookmarking), but no -- when I re-wound I hadn't really missed anything.

All that said, the story is sufficiently original and interesting that I do intend to at least get the second book to see if the disparate story lines ever come together!

Overrated

I purchased this one because of the high reviews. Frankly I felt it was a little dull AND over-acted. The writing seemed amateurish. 2 stars.

Well, it's about Princesses and Elves and stuff...

I like SciFi and some Fantasy, but I don't live and breathe it.

The ratings for this series are incredible, so I took a chance and listened to it. It's just another Fantasy series, folks - it seemed a little underwritten to me, but maybe it picks up in later books, I don't know. I'm not going to spend the money to find out.

If you REALLY like this sort of thing, go for it. I was bored.

Could have been better

I have listened to hundreds of books and find the narration on this to be the worst yet. The narrator didn't pause between scene changes, paragraphs, and in some cases even sentences. This distracted so much from the story, I eventually gave up listening.