A Girl and Five Brave Horses

By: Sonora Carver

Narrated by: Andrea Giordani

Length: 6 hrs and 13 mins

Publisher's Summary

Sonora Carver (1904-2003) was a circus entertainer and one of the first female horse divers. In the arresting autobiography A Girl and Five Brave Horses, Sonora tells her life story. Her sensational act was mounting a running horse as it reached the top of a 40-foot or 60-foot tower and sailing down on its back as it plunged into an 11-foot pool of water below. In 1931, she was blinded due to hitting the water off balance with open eyes while diving her horse. After the accident, she continued to dive horses until 1942. The film Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken is loosely based on her life.

Public Domain (P)2020 Museum Audiobooks

Terrible narrator!

Narrator made it impossible for me to finish! I tried multiple times and it time it got more and more annoying!

Great Story, Terrible Reader

The story is great and anyone who’s seen Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken will love it. However, the reader has an accent that comes and goes, seeming sometimes British and sometimes German. This is not only annoying but problematic since Sonora was Southern, and the reader pronounces several words wrong to the point where some of them are nearly incomprehensible. Moreover, the editing was very poorly done. There are bits where there are repeated words akin to a vinyl record skip and several bits where the reader sighs or starts to make a comment to someone in the recording room. It’s very jarring and if the story wasn’t so intriguing I’d honestly have never made it through this book.

good story

what an interesting life! I've wanted to get hold of this book for a while so I was happy to find it on audible. my only complaint is that while it was read well, the narrator's accent was slightly off putting and her pronunciation of some words very strange. I kept mentally correcting and was pulled out of the story for it.

Poor choice of narrator, but great story

Narrator a strange mix of British, Irish, South African and Colonial India to be reading a story with significant pieces of Americana. Didn’t care for the reader and her but here pronunciation of ‘pedestal, and Yosemite,’ but if you’ve seen the movie, you’ll like the book 10X more!

A wonderful story!!

Such a great story and so well written. The reader is great. I was surprised to hear an English accent for the very American author.
I loooooved the story!!

Good story but the narrator was terrible

The story was entertaining enough that I bought it for my granddaughters. The narrator Bob not due the book justice

Great story

The story itself is wonderful… however… the person reading it has much to thick of a British accent to really love it. Sonora is from the south and it is really hard to listen to the person reading it and believe it is a true story.

Awesome story, mediocre performance

This autobiography is wonderful: gripping, succinct, and entertaining. However the choice of narrator is bizarre. Sonora Carver was American and yet a British person, for whom English may even be a secondary language, was chosen. Her overall tone and inflection was good but there were many obvious mispronunciations of regular words as well as well-known American place names.

Charming book - Worst Reader Ever!

I absolutely loved this book, but I had to give up listening to it on my ride to work everyday and just read it in my own. For some bizarre reason, they chose to have a woman with a thick European/Italian accent read an autobiography about an American woman's life as a horse diver. That in itself was already very confusing and off-putting. I tried to get past that, but unfortunately she didn't read well at all and I couldn't even understand her most of the time. Ugh!!

Great book, disappointing reading.

This book is fascinating. Sonora's life was very unique.

I had a really hard time with this reader. Sonora wrote this book in the first person. She is from Georgia. This reader has a Scottish (I think) accent. That disconnect is off-putting. It wouldn't be that bad if the reader had taken the time to learn how to pronounce things like "Yosemite" and "Waco." If you're a professional speaker, learn how to pronounce place names. The reader also always sounds irritated. Like she is impatiently telling me this story.

Whoever edited this also didn't cut out all the multiple takes. At times the reader would say something then immediately repeat it, clearly a second take. Other times I could hear other people chatting in the background. Seeing such a wonderful story produced with such a lack of care is frustrating.