Jukebox Hero

SledgeHammer: A Rock & Roll Fable, Book 1

By: Jason Stuart

Narrated by: Bridget Shapiro

Length: 17 hrs and 24 mins

Publisher's summary

It's Back to the '80s like never before!

Things aren't all rainbows and cupcakes at the corner of Elm and E streets. Molly Slater just wants to forget everything she can't remember and play heavy metal with her best friend in the garage. And maybe get a date for prom if he's not a skeeze.

But someone in this 'burb has been killing redheads, and Molly has the reddest hair of them all.

When a night of babysitting gone wrong gets her in the crosshairs of the local gang scene, Molly discovers fabulous secrets about herself.

The hunted becomes the hunter as she prowls the darkness that has crept into her sleepy town. But a far more sinister force, some thing from another world, has other plans in store for her...

©2021 Jason Stuart (P)2021 Jason Stuart

wow

wow. I loved this book, as soon as I finished, i immediately ordered the next two in the series on kindle. well written and never boring. the author does an amazing job at weaving in tiny details. plus, it was a fun read.

A totally rad hit!

I truly enjoyed every minute of this. Being a fantasy geek, a member of Gen-X, a pop culture buff, and an 80’s music fan, this book delivered in every way possible. I wish I had written this myself! The chapter names with 80’s song titles was awesome. Molly is a great protagonist. The dialogue was both fresh and delightfully retro. Bridget Shapiro was the perfect narrator for this, and I should know, as she’s narrated several books I’ve written as well. Huge props to Jason Stuart for writing a totally tubular musical-fantasy adventure for my generation!

Great story, narrator let me down

A great story but I found the narrator a bit off. She seemed to pause in the wrong places, lit a simulated voice.

Interesting Plot idea, execution needs work

First the stuff that might make you stop listenening before you get to what is good about this book.

The narrator has some good points - her enunciation is clear and I can always tell who is speaking, her voices are distinct. However it seems like she worked so hard on those aspects that she lost the ability to read naturally. There are unnatural pauses between words which make it sound less like reading a story than an actor trying desperately to remember lines or somebody sounding out words, and this is so strong in the dialog I honestly can't tell if the dialog is bad, or just badly narrated.

To this is the fact that the world (which is not ours, that's fine) appears to be constructed of 1980s movie tropes. That is every character and many of the scenes are straight expies from movies, even to identical names. To give an example, the protagonists power starts to manifest in a scene that is a cross between "Nobody Leaves Without Playing the Blues" and the Blues Brothers adventure playing for a Country Western crowd. I honestly though the characters enhanced abilities were because she was in a babysitter role at the time while on the run from criminals and because of the world-construction, she was getting "Adventures in Babysitting" superpowers. I found all of this very distracting and not especially enjoyable when it turned out that the world is just like this, it isn't important to the plot. As the real plot progresses this fades more into the background and becomes less distracting.

Now the good....the reason I didn't stop reading (aside from a tendency to finish books I start, no matter how flawed) is that the driving plot itself and the protagonist was actually a kind of cool concept. Without spoilers - it is entirely believable that a teenage girl in highschool with the protagonist's background would never know she had powers, largely because of the social dynamics at play. I kinda got into the story at that point.

I might give the author and even the narrator another chance, at least with a free credit. The former has some storytelling ideas but I'd prefer something that isn't in a mashup of pop culture tropes as worldbuilding UNLESS that somehow tied into the story being told. The narrator - I'd need to hear a sample to make sure she'd gotten past whatever her issue was with pauses reading this book. She's actually good at voices - making them distinct without relying overly on accents, but unless she can learn to narrate in a more natural way, I won't be buying any more from her if the sample doesn't sound better.