Daughter of the Drow

Forgotten Realms: Starlight & Shadows, Book 1

By: Elaine Cunningham

Narrated by: Dara Rosenberg

Beautiful as she is deadly, Liriel Baenre flits throught the shadows of Menzoberranzan, city of the dark elves. Amid treachery and murder that are the drow's daily fare, she feels something calling to her...something beyond this dusky world far removed from the sun. Yet as she ventures toward the surface and the lands of light, enemies pursue her unceasingly.

And one enemy may offer her the only hope of salvation.

©2003 Wizards of the Coast LLC (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

A different look at the Drow

If you've only read RA Salvator's work with the drow than you owe it to yourself to check out Daughter of the Drow. Lyriel the main characters is a witty, devious and enjoyable character whom actually revel's in he culture even as she slowly learns to reject its evil. These delightful contradictions and intrigue make this story extremely enjoyable. The story is extremely fun, well paced with an great supporting cast of allies and enemies for Lyriel and over all a real delight.

The story is set in the heyday of 2nd edition D&D's Forgotten Realms but it works well as a stand alone and any fan of fantasy should be able to get into and enjoy this series with no prior knowledge of the setting or D&D in general, however if you do read the other Drow centric book it acts as nice little companion piece.

However as good as the story is the current recording is of very low quality. The reader doesn't have very good audio quality, the editing is a pit choppy and the actors choice of inflection is rather unusual which might prove distracting to some listeners. If they can fix the audio issues I'd say this is a must buy for any fan of the Drow and the Forgotten Realms.

A surprising performance

I don't need to say much on the story. Its a great look at the drow taken from the perspective of a female and Cunningham does a wonderful job at telling it. The female lead is well crafted and a decently believable character of someone that grew up in a cut throat society. I will say if you aren't super familiar with the Forgotten Realms, you might need to google some creature names to understand what some monster is. There seems to be an expectation that the reader is somewhat familiar with the Forgotten Realms, which I appreciate. The performance of Rosenberg is what I think really comes through and was kind of surprising. I've gotten use to a lot of narrators now a days that barrel through a book like they need to get it done and on to the next one -- this isn't the case here. Rosenberg takes her time in reading and it comes off like how you would read a story to a child. She does a decent job of changing up her voice for different characters. There are only 2 complaints I have with the performance though. First, the recording's rough draft and touch up phase were very obvious. The rough draft recording is the majority of book and sounds good, but when they went back and fixed up some bad readings the settings for recording weren't the same and sound worse. The jumps between these two are very jarring. Second, the way Rosenberg reads some lines is kind of jarring based on what the text says. She might read something in a chipper tone with no inflection but then the text says "she said exasperatedly." I only consider this a problem because sometimes the narrator actually does try to match voice to what the text says and then sometimes doesn't. This jumping between following the content of the text and not, simply tarnishes what could have been a spectacular performance. Overall its still a 5/5 I think.

Goood!!

Its a great story although the narrator mispronounces some words. Fantastic book if you like R.A. Salvatore material

Good book, but the narrator ruins it

The person who reads this audiobook reads it with a weirdly prim and over-energetic voice, and reads fairly slowly. It’s like she’s reading to a baby and crisply pronouncing the heck out of every word to help the baby learn to talk.

At first it was funny to hear descriptions of drow violence read in a childrens’ storybook voice, but the voice got more and more grating the longer I listened. And the pace of the reading is slow, so there are hours and hours of it to listen to.

I made it through two hours before I gave up and returned it. I’ll finish reading it in written format - I like the story and the characters, but I just can’t take any more of the narrator’s voice.

If you are learning English and looking for something slow with very enunciated words to practice your listening, this would be great for that. But if you’re reading for fun, get the Kindle version instead.

poor narration

great story, but the narrator mispronounces a number of common words which makes the story hard to follow. For example: bedraggled is usually pronounced bee-drag-uld not bed-rag-led, or the distinction between 'weary' and 'wary' - different words, different sound, different meaning, but mispronounced interchangeably.
There also seem to be quite a few choppy bits where the audio was obviously edited. it sounds like a different person - or the same person using a very different tone of voice.