As if I Am Not There

Watch Me Shrink I'll Prove It to Everyone I Won't Stop Till I'm Tiny I Will Be Thin

By: Alexandra Filia

Narrated by: Kelly Anne Sanders

Length: 3 hrs and 49 mins

Publisher's summary

Winny Stokes is like every other normal 17 year old living an idyllic teenage life with lots of friends, pets, a boyfriend, and a family who adores her. She also has a serious preoccupation with her weight, but she mostly manages to control it. When her jeans become tight, she knows what to do...

But when the pressures of her last year in senior school, university entrance exams and troubles at home get bigger and more demanding, will she need to do something more drastic to stay on track?

Soon she is deeply entangled in the dark world of extreme dieting and her life and the lives of all those who love her are about to change forever.

©2019 Alexandra Filia (P)2019 Alexandra Filia

Gripping and touching

Great book. Interesting insight into a teenagers life and eating disorders. Starts out funny, but slowly turns grim.

Nasally reader, several misread words, lazy ending

Most of the story is good. The ending is lazy, the kind of ending you get from a high school kid who can't figure out how to end a story and chooses to go with an old cliche instead of coming up with an actual ending.

The reader is the worst part. The fake accent is inconsistent and unrealistic, and she always sounds like she needs to blow her nose. Listening to her makes me feel like I have a sinus infection. In the intro, when she uses her real accent, she doesn't have the nasally sound. She should've read the whole book in her real accent to avoid that nauseating nasal sound.

In several places she misreads words. For example, instead of reading "tips and tricks" she says "trips and tricks". Sometimes the mistakes are ridiculous, like when she describes the main character as being 1.74 centimeters tall. Her reading mistakes should have been caught at the time and re-recorded. She also mispronounces words in a distracting way. For example, she unprofessionally mispronounces et cetera as "ex cetera".

The sound quality is very inconsistent. In some places it's clear that parts have been re-recorded, probably due to mistakes. For example, every line that includes the name Lela has a very different sound quality from the rest of the section, so she evidently didn't know how to pronounce the name and had to re-record it. She should've re-recorded several other parts, too. Also, at the beginning of one chapter there's some strange background noise before she starts reading. It's distracting enough that I stopped what I was doing to try to see if I'd accidentally started a call or something, but then I figured out that it was a flaw in the book recording.

The reader actually has a nice voice, if only she'd read correctly, use her real voice, and stop the congested sound.

No story

I got half way through. It was just a series of ramblings, it just kept going on and on. The author repeated things frequently, she kept on adding such boring, never ending, useless details. Most of the content I read had nothing to do with the description of the story.