Ashfall

By: Mike Mullin

Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne

Length: 11 hrs and 53 mins

Publisher's summary

Under the bubbling hot springs and geysers in Yellowstone National Park lies a supervolcano so large that it can be seen only from a plane or satellite. Most people don't know it's there. But it's overdue for an eruption, which would obliterate the landscape and change the climate, creating a dark, volcanic winter that could last for years.

For Alex, being left home alone for the weekend means the freedom to play his computer games and hang out with his friends without hassle from his mother. Then the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts, plunging his hometown into a nightmare of darkness, ash, and violence. Alex begins a harrowing trek to search for his family and finds help in Darla, a travel partner he meets along the way. Together they must find the strength and skills to survive and outlast an epic disaster.

©2011 Mike Mullin (P)2015 Tanglewood Publishing

Different

It was good to listen to a story wherein the survivor wasn't a "perfect prepper" and where a woman was a truly strong character. Well done!

Loved this book!!

Every time I look outside and see sunshine, I'm surprised - that's how real this book is to me. I feel like I've lived through it, and it wasn't always a pretty journey.

My only complaint is that book two and three are not audiobooks, so if I want to finish it, I have to sit and read it. :-( I don't know why they haven't recorded the other two books but they need to ASAP!

Has This Narrator Ever LISTENED to an Audiobook??!

Edited: HOLY CARP! THIS NARRATOR IS APPARENTLY WELL-LIKED if you can believe his webpage! I'm flabbergasted because I listened to his other samples and I find them ALL to be...uh...NOT to my taste. His accents and dialects are overdone and cartoonish, his reading is abysmally predictable in cadence and prosody, and his performances come to my ear as completely overwrought and phoney!

I've lived all over the U.S. and traveled and worked abroad, and NO ONE TALKS LIKE THAT. Anywhere! Uuuggghhh! Poor guy. He looks like a nice guy, he really does, and I'm sure he IS! But I couldn't stand his "performances" - not in one other sample I tried. So, well, we all have our Things, so keep in mind when you read the following review that when I wrote it, I had NO IDEA who this guy was (and that he had done other books, and improv, and all the things).

I'm kinda feeling sorry for him now, but I gotta try to save SOMEONE from this audiobook. (BTW, the AUTHOR apparently didn't care for Kirby's narration because he read the rest of the series himself. Very badly. Possibly worse.)

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ORIGINAL REVIEW, written BEFORE reading Kirby's website (sorry, Kirby, You're a great guy, I'm sure, just not for me):

You know, I hate to criticize someone's craft, because they probably were trying their best, and maybe they just didn't know any better. And really, the person who should be criticized most heavily is whoever did the producing, because that person should have seen to it that they hired someone who knew what they were doing.

But if you want to BE an audiobook narrator/performer, the very first thing you MUST DO is listen to about a thousand (LITERALLY, one thousand) audiobooks from every genre you can stand to listen to, with male performers, female performers, full cast audio, etc. Make sure you listen to books for toddlers and books for elementary school kids and middle schooolers and teens and adults. And TAKE NOTES on what YOU like, and what kind of narrators get great reviews and which get panned and which ones win awards.

Take an acting class or two, or better yet, do some improv. Or maybe just live in our society and listen to how people TALK. Then read about a THOUSAND books OUT LOUD to ACTUAL PEOPLE in person and see what they think. You're bound to get some good feedback from some of these people, as long as they're not your mom (she HAS to tell you that you're great; she's your mom, but you should take it with a grain of salt until it's confirmed by at least several others of your audience).

The narrator/"performer" of this book CLEARLY did NOT do any of those things.

I honestly can't say if it was a good story or even if it was well-written, because the reading (can hardly call it anything else, but I'm not sure I want to make it seem even that good) was SO BAD that I couldn't get past the first chapter!

What was bad about it, you ask?

It was slow, OVERWROUGHT, melodramatic, false-sounding, gaggy reading, through which I could not actually HEAR THE WORDS that the author wrote. It sounded like someone told this guy to read the book as though it were a cheeseball bodice-ripping romance novel written for toddlers and read by a seventh-grade girl on her period who's taken a few swigs from the Nyquil bottle, and who dreams of someday moving to Hollywood to play a desperate housewife or maybe a lovelorn nurse on the original Dragnet TV series!

I've rarely heard anything this spectacularly bad that was supposed to be a professional production. NOBODY TALKS THIS WAY! Nobody even READS this way! How did this guy get the job? Is he the author's brother or was he the only one who showed up for the audition or what??

I am someone who HAS actually listened to over a thousand audiobooks, who HAS actually kept records of the good, the bad, and the ugly, and who has ACTUALLY read many, MANY books out loud to an audience (that did not always include my mom). I don't claim to be a professional but I'm getting darn near expert on knowing what GOOD is, what BAD is, and when a producer should be fired.

There is a range of taste, yes, and also different voices and styles work better with different genres. Maybe this guy would do well at reading abridged, simplified versions of popular inspirational Christian bible stories adapted for people with cognitive impairment. That's about what he sounds like he might be aiming for.

If not, he had better take a listen to Ray Porter, Tim Gerard Reynolds, Rosario Dawson, Wil Wheaton, Tatiana Maslany, or even some of the "classic" performers like Jenny Sterlin, Jim Dale, Campbell Scott, or George Guidall. There's a WIDE range of styles in there, but something they have in common is that they SOUND LIKE REAL PEOPLE!

Seriously, folks, I DID have a very quick listen to the sample, but it WAS late at night and maybe my Ambien had already kicked in a little, but it didn't sound THAT bad right away. Well, regrets! After buying it and trying it in earnest (and throwing up into my mouth a little before shouting "Alexa, turn it off quick before I am actually the first person to really DIE of an audiobook!"), what I have to say is...RUN AWAY! Don't waste a PENNY nevermind a CREDIT on this!

If you're really interested in the book, read it yourself. For my part, in the first chapter there were already too many mentions of martial arts, the main character's mom, and World of Warcraft, so I think I know it's not my scene. I love YA and I'm all down with the apocalypse but something tells me the protagonist is a total dweeb loser to whom I could never learn to relate enough to stay with him through even half of the end of the world. Probably not even the BEGINNING of the end.

If I were the author, I'd be very upset about the choice of narrator, because it's POSSIBLE that there MIGHT be a good story (no idea, and I do doubt it, but I'll offer the POSSIBILITY), but if there is one, I'd be surprised if anyone but the two or three moms of the gentlemen involved in bringing this book to your ears will ever find out.

Audible, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Have you no pride? Stand you not behind that which you put forth into the world? How do you sleep at night knowing that this is the kind of offal you are peddling to your unsuspecting members? Ah, right, you listen to the OTHER audiobooks! Oh, and there's the Ambien...

Loved It

was very excited about this coming out on audio book. It's the only way I get to read these days. I hope the second book will be out soon. I wasn't disappointed

Good

I liked the premise of this story, a real super volcano and the potential impacts if it were to erupt. The story had a good flow as well. The one thing I did not appreciate was the sing song type of way the narration was done. I'm sure it's just me but that's what came to mind as I listed to the delivery and I'm not a fan of this style. The style of narration is so important to my enjoyment of the story and I think recently, that is just as important to me as the story being told. This did not really keep me from enjoying the story, it was just a minor annoyance and not nearly as bad as some others I have heard.

Great book, terrible narrator

I don't think I am going to be able to finish this audiobook. The book is great, and the writing style is captivating. But I think I am going to have to get the physical book to finish it. The narrator's monotonous voice is very hard to listen to. It's audiobooks like this that make me wish we could have a choice of narrator.

Could you show some kind of enthusiasm?

I get it that the world is ending in the book and the world is basically dying but, that doesn't mean that you should narrate it like you're dead on the inside as well. Holy crap in a pita. I almost fell asleep standing up listening to this. If Audible considers having this narrated by someone else to show a little more LIFE in the narration, feel free to message me. I'll do it for half of what this guy was paid.

Better to read this one than listen.

The story was entertaining and engaging enough for me to stick with it despite the horrible performance by Kirby Heyborne. Glad to see the next one in the series is narrated by the author.

Slightly Juvenile

This book review is about perspective. I'm over 40 and purchased this book for a 5 hour trip with my kids. Maybe if I was younger, I would appreciate this book. Frankly, it was difficult as an adult to understand the narrator's decisions.
He leaves his relatively safe home to go looking for his parents. Why? At no point does it cross his mind that staying put might make it easier for his parents to find him or for staying safe in an uncertain world.

Also, I find it amazing that only one week after the disaster, there is no food to be found anywhere in the State of Iowa. The entire State is starving and can't seem to get organized to bring in food. Further, why does the entire state turn into Mad Max so quickly? So much of the early part of the book was a YA rip off of the "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy. Suddenly, everywhere our narrator goes, he is in danger if being killed by criminals.

Great book

I thought this was a very good book. Not a typical YA novel. the narrator does a good job of reading the book and with changing voices for each character. I would recommend this book to my friends.

Robot

The narrator sounds terribly robotic. Such a shame since the storyline and writing is amazing.

Awful

I couldn’t listen all the way through, the story is probably ok but the narration is just awful, totally robotic