A Kingdom Besieged

De: Raymond E Feist

Narrado por: John Meagher

“Feist has the universe firmly under his control.”
—Contra Costa Times

“Feist has a natural talent for keeping the reader turning pages.”
—Chicago-Sun Times

Midkemia’s fifth and final Riftwar—the devastating Chaoswar—explodes in the opening volume of Raymond E. Feist’s spectacular new epic fantasy trilogy of magic, conflict, and world-shattering peril. A Kingdom Besieged is a breathtaking adventure that brings back Pug—first introduced in Feist’s classic debut novel, Magician, and now Midkemia’s most powerful sorcerer—who faces a major magical cataclysm that forces him to question everything he’s ever held as true and dear…including the loyalty of his beloved son Magnus. The Chaoswar promises to be the crowning achievement in the three decades-long career of a New York Times bestselling master fantasist who rules the sword and sorcery universe along with Terry Goodkind, George R. R. Martin, and Terry Brooks.

enjoyed the book but the narrator is horrendous

This narrator does not have the necessary skills to do his job. He reads past the breaks for point of view changes so you cannot tell he is either on a new chapter or changed scenes.

His Voice does not pull you into the story at all, he is boring, and his character voices are terrible.

the publisher needs to have these readings redone. His reading is detrimental potential fans as it makes the book not enjoyable to listen to.

Narrator improving, but still bad

This book is best listened to using speed of 0.85, otherwise the narration is way too fast for actual enjoyment.

After that, you can look forward to rabid and consistent mispronunciation of midekemia specific words such as Keshian (KESH-ee-uhn, NOT KEESH-ee-in).

Sounds petty, but the truth is that hearing poor pronunciation is like someone tying rope around your waist and then tugging on it randomly in random directions while walking down a hallway: you cannot get anywhere fast and it ruins an otherwise nice walk,

Very annoying, and now I wonder why I paid money for someone to connect my testicles with wires and then plug it into an electrical receptacle in the wall.

Do you smell something burning?

Will it ever end....

Is there anything you would change about this book?

I'm half way through this book and I must say the narrator was a poor choice. He's not too bad when performing some of the characters voices, but he's insufferable any other time.

What didn’t you like about John Meagher’s performance?

nothing......really......nothing

recording quality is shockingly bad

I can't believe they would actually allow a recording this bad to be published. I loved the book and it fit with the rest if fiests work.

Fix your audio

Did you record this in a server room?! As an audio engineer it hurts to listen to this. How can you ignore the MASSIVE amount of background noise. EQ, deEssing, reverb.....all crap. Production value of this is awful. I had to fix it before I ended up listening to it.

Bad narrator

What happened to the previous narrator? This guy speaks to quickly, doesn’t have a good variety of accents & most importantly mispronounces names & places. If the story wasn’t so good, I wouldn’t bother. Has the producer never heard of continuity??

Great story, poor performance

It's a standard continuation of the Riftwar Cycle. Much of what comes is rooted in it's past. Don't expect grand new ideas, but revel in the fan service. Sadly, a subpar reader mars damages this audiobook but it isn't unlistenable. Be prepared for the just most wrong fantasy word pronunciation ever.

Unfortunate narration

While I suppose narrators have to get experience somewhere, it is a shame for this series to be concluded by someone with out the skill to properly service the work. They story is great. The performance, not so much.

Tough to follow

The most important thing I can say about this book is that you need to like stories with a many-branching focus that follows many different characters and locations. This book follows maybe 5 different stories all in the same universe but, as far as this book went, largely unrelated. There is a war that traverses most of these storylines but that's about as much connection as you'll get in the first book. I'm sure in later books it will all come together.

The style is very classic fantasy. There are multiple worlds connected by portals with humans, demons, elves, and all the other cliche races. There is a lot of magic involved but no stated magic system as of yet so don't expect an explanation of how any of it works. In that sense it really is magic but this also means it has no real depth for the listener because you have no idea what is or isn't possible or why anyone chooses to use magic as they do.

The main reason that my experience with this book was poor is that it jumped around so much that I never felt involved with any of the characters and what time was spent on each of them was mostly idle chatter. Basically, I never got drawn in and often found that I had stopped listening for minutes at a time and had to rewind, though there was little gain for doing so. I'm not by any means going to say this proves it's a bad book. I admit that I prefer stories that have just one or two main foci and that is simply a preference but I do feel this book did little to invest the listener in any of the characters. It probably gets more gripping in the later books but I'll be stopping here.

Book is great but this reader is terrible.

Great book the entirety of Feist's work is amazing. This reader is terrible. His pronunciation of simple words is bad enough to cause cringing of anyone that read the series themselves or has listened to the other readers. Kesh is not pronounced Keesh. He struggles with even more basic words
Overall a great story but would be better of downloading the text and have Microsoft word read it back on text to speech.