Fables and Folk Tales Collection

By: Valerie Houston, Highlights for Children

Narrated by: full cast

Length: 6 hrs and 13 mins

Publisher's summary

Listen and relive the exciting tales from Highlights, now on audio! Learn about a boy at a Spanish market who knocks over a stand of avocados down a hill and makes guacamole and about a jungle that is full of terror at the thought that a monster could be lurking in the shadows, along with other stories.

Stories include: "Granny Smith’s Disappearing Apples", "Everella’s Wand", "Clever Hodja Foolish Hodja", "Hummingbird and Heron", "Isaac and the Lonely Tree", "If Ever I Meet a Dragon", "Maureen’s Harp", "Night Owl Nabs the Sheep Snatcher", "Stop the Hungry Giant Fish!", "The Bluebird and the Coyote", "Sharing the Wheat", and more.

©2021 Highlights Magazine (P)2021 Blackstone Publishing and Highlights for Children

Cant handle the robotic narrating

This might be the worst script reading I have ever heard on an audible book.

Edited and curated poorly

Let me start by saying this. I grew up on Highlights and much like the magazine the stories that I could bare to listen to were very enduring. Each narrator brought very special reads to each story and my favorite one was Clever Hoja, Foolish Hoja (chapter 9). With that being said, the inconsistency in audio quality make it very difficult to sit through. Lost of narrators have canned and tiny audio that hurt my ears when listening with head phones on; and a few sounded as if they were cheap AI narrators.

I don’t know what the process was in curating and engineering these audiobooks but I wish they would have kept with a consistent sound or at the very least done a quality test with headphones to really listen to each story. I don’t know if it’s a thing but it kind of threw my inner ear off and made me sea sick with the inconsistency and audio readjusting.

In short, I couldn’t finish this due to poor audio engineering.