36 Streets

De: T. R. Napper

Narrado por: Katherine Littrell

Altered Carbon and The Wind-Up Girl meet Apocalypse Now in this fast-paced, intelligent, action-driven cyberpunk, probing questions of memory, identity, and the power of narratives.

Lin “The Silent One” Vu is a gangster and sometime private investigator living in Chinese-occupied Hanoi, in the steaming, paranoid alleyways of the 36 Streets. Born in Vietnam, raised in Australia, everywhere she is an outsider.

Through grit and courage Lin has carved a place for herself in the Vietnamese underworld where Hanoi’s crime boss, Bao Nguyen, is training her to fight and lead. Bao drives her hard; on the streets there are no second chances. Meanwhile the people of Hanoi are succumbing to Fat Victory - a dangerously addictive immersive simulation of the US-Vietnam war.

When an Englishman comes to Hanoi on the trail of his friend’s murderer, Lin’s life is turned upside down. She is drawn into the grand conspiracies of the neon gods - of regimes and mega-corporations - as they unleash dangerous new technologies.

Lin must confront the immutable moral calculus of unjust wars. She must choose: family, country, or gang. Blood, truth, or redemption. No choice is easy on the 36 Streets.

©2022 T. R. Napper (P)2022 Blackstone Publishing

Good Character Development

I think the story is unique and quite interesting with great characters.

Spoiler below
To the author. WTH is up with the ambiguous and muddled last few chapters. You almost ruined an amazing book.

really cool feel

does a brilliant job creating a place that feels real. brutal story with great characters.

Discombobulated

I didn't follow this story well. The writing was very choppy. Bad language was unnecessary and too much of it. I couldn't listen past Chapter 18. Narration was good but story was boring.

No groundbreaking themes, but a fun ride through new territory

Excellent atmosphere, interesting premise, brilliantly realized world, and a classic cyberpunk story. It's a great book, but not a lot of good things happen to the people in it. It touches on the classic cyberpunk themes through a different lense than usual (I cannot expound without spoiling) and comes to the same conclusions as so many books like this have beforehand, just in a different way than I've ever seen.
I saw some reviews calling this book 'preachy' which I did not find at all. My biggest and only real issue with the book was the prose which got annoying after a while. The author has clearly read a lot of Richard K. Morgan and cranked his style up to 11.
The narrator was great. She really helped smooth the problems with prose and did a good job with the voices. Not an asian accent anywhere in this book, though thats probably a good idea. The western accents she did were great.

Amazing

I really enjoyed this story and the narrator was good, but I'm not quite sure what I thought of the attempt at helicopter sound.

One thing that I really appreciated with this audiobook is that the chapters are short without taking away from the story, because I listen very often when I'm working and 5-10 minute chapters work perfectly then.