The Shattered Rose

Dark Champion Series, Book 3

By: Jo Beverley

Narrated by: Charlie Albers

Length: 14 hrs and 46 mins

Publisher's summary

When Galeran of Heywood returns from the Crusades, longing for his wife, Jehanne, he finds his castle under siege and his wife alone with a child that is not his own.

Seeing Galeran alive was all Jehanne ever hoped for. But credible rumors of Galeran's death wrought dangerous folly that Jehanne never expected when they kissed goodbye three years prior.

Now enemies from church and state hover, looking for spoils, and Galeran and Jehanne must decide: find a way to forgive each other and fight together, or allow others to orchestrate their fate.

Contains mature themes.

©1996 Jo Beverley Pub. Inc. (P)2022 Tantor

Exquisite Narration

Charlie Albers always impresses me with her careful and sensitive narrations. This audiobook did not disappoint. Her narration held my attention and kept me listening to a genre that is not normally my favorite.

Disappointing narrator

I like Jo Beverley's Medieval stories and this is a unique story of a fractured marriage and a difficult situation of rebuilding a relationship. There is also a secondary couple of a would-be nun and a seductive knight who end up deeply in love - their more straightforward relationship brings relief from the tension in the primary couple dancing on the knife's edge.

The narrator could handle some of the aspects, mainly the protagonist couple's conflicts and emotions, but in other ways, she was a great disappointment.
First of all, she chose a very strange pronunciation for the hero's name (Galeran) - she kept omitting the 'l' in the middle. Then, she could not keep a consistent voice pitch for the characters, especially the males. It even happened sometimes during the same dialog that something said by the male character sounded as high-pitched as the female character he was talking with, so I lost track of who was supposed to say what. Then, sometimes the characters spoke with a cartoonishly exaggerated voice totally inappropriate to anything but comedy, which this Medieval romance is not. A Medieval king pronouncing judgment can't say "so be it" in a chirping governess voice! The knights had no weight and force to them at all. There is a long, crucial scene where the king sits in judgment of several of the characters, where the villains' plot is revealed and they are served justice. This scene is completely ruined by the cartoonish, unreal way the characters speak and by the narrator occasionally using a soft feminine voice timbre when knights and king should be displayed by the voice.
The secondary hero, the Norman-French character Raoul has a really silly-sounding supposed French accent, and while his dialogue is supposed to be very sensual, there is nothing attractive in the way he speaks. Also, the narrator seems to be chuckling over the sensuality and physical attraction experienced by the characters,
I wish this was narrated by Susan Duerden who read the other recently published Jo Beverley titles. Or a male narrator even. Although I love Jo Beverley's Medieval stories, I can't really look forward to them if they are read by this narrator.