Magic Hour

very good

I listened to firefly lane which was a good book as well. But Magic hour is at the top of my list of awesome books.

No , I have a 5 hour drive to listen to books and then at home when walking or doing housework. I stayed up late last two night to finish the book .

I work with special needs children this was such a touching story. Had me crying a few times.
When the girl started to show emotion and how it made Julia feel and how it brought the people of a close knit town even closer . How Alice changed so many lives and how something so horrible could happen to a child and survive.

In the top 50%

I enjoyed the overall storyline. It was just a good Kristen Hannah escape novel. I enjoyed the feral child (wolf child) plot line and the child's character development through the story.

Julia is a prominent psychiatrist who has botched a recent case and is now faced with the challenge of working with a deeply emotionally scared child who has been abandoned. Her deepening love for this child as the plot progresses is very moving.

A great "escape" listen!

Every time I listen to this book all I can picture is who is going to star in the Lifetime movie version. It is a very light and easy listen. If I drift off, there's no problem catching up.

The narrator is annoying to me. I don't like the voices she uses, especially the chief of police who sounds like she's 12. The setting (town and it's people) is extremely cliche. The thing that keeps me coming back is I want to know what happened to the little girl.

If you can, I'd wait for the movie.

Absolutely not. I would have purchased the print version over the audio.

For one, she is too old to be narrating this book. Most of the characters are in their 30s and 40s, and her voice sounds like a 70 year old woman. Also, a lot of her characters sound like the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. It was grating and annoying. I almost just ditched the audio book in favor of the written, but as I had already paid for it I pushed through.

I will never understand why the producers of some audio books think it's a good idea and choose to use actors and actresses who are WAY beyond the characters ages (especially when you can tell they are too old to portray the characters). There is nothing like listening to a scene between two 30 somethings and hearing a 60 - 70 year old woman's voice trying to do the scenes. It makes it virtually impossible to get into the books. Audio books aren't cheap, and it is frustrating to have to grit through a book being tortured by a bad narrator.

I've really embraced audio books and 2013 looks like it will be a fantastic year of listening to books. I'm so glad that I started with Magic Hour. I found it hard to tear myself away from the car when I would get to my destination because I was so engrossed in the story. I needed to know who "Girl" was and how she came to be living out in the forest. For the most part I enjoyed the narrator, but I did find myself annoyed every once in a while when I thought she could have put more feeling behind some of her words.

Recommend? Yes, but just know that at times I felt that Suzanne's narration was lacking in energy.

Good read

I haven't read three of these stories before. Refreshing topic.

Julia

This enlightened me as a mom!

This is one of those books that could have been written at any time since 1955 or so. It's missing the nuances and details of contemporary situations, details that for me, make a novel truly relatable.

The narrator delivers the book in what I call a "Hollywood" accent, sounding vaguely like Deborah Kerr, Grace Kelly, Vivian Leigh, etc., a "stage-speak" that was developed in the superstar movie heydays of the 1950's. No one actually talks this way and I found it a bit off-putting, difficult to connect with. One of the characters sounds exactly like Judy Garland in "The Wizard of Oz".

Still, the dynamic between the sisters works as an appealing story line, and from what I've seen of Hannah's other novels, this is a recurrent theme.

Could have done without the introduction of a feral child, though. But perhaps that is just me, with my dislike of fantasy and all that.