Old Man's Patch

On a dusty little backwater planet where nothing ever happens, retired mechanic Ezra Kowalski’s biggest worry is keeping his prized cucumbers safe from pests—and from his meddling neighbor, Mrs. Wong.

That is, until a spaceship crash-lands square in the middle of his veggie patch.

Out tumbles a soft-spoken teenage girl from a nearby world and her infuriatingly cheerful robot. With a massive solar flare knocking out all communication and grounding space travel for the foreseeable future, they’re stuck there together.

Ezra wants nothing more than to fix his vines and go back to being left alone. But between the girl’s strange stories, the robot’s attempts to “help,” and Mrs. Wong sniffing around for gossip, he begins to suspect that this quiet little planet might still have a few surprises left for him.

A heartwarming cozy sci-fi about unlikely friendships, stubborn neighbors, and what grows when you least expect it.

slice of life read by a machine

Good low impact story. Unfortunately, the audiobook is read very monotonously. Many dialogues are done with weird emphasis, as if the reader got to the end of a sentence only to realize it was a question.

Great charactor d. evelopment.

I liked the banter between the charactors. 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 word minimum!

AI isn’t worth it.

AI narration is horrible. Might have been a good book, but lack of inflection killed any mood.

I loved this.

I liked this little book. it has definite "A Man Called Ove" vibes. even though it uses a virtual voice actor, i think it did the book justice.

Boring

I kept waiting for something interesting to happen: then after about halfway I started skipping ahead. The characters continually sniped at each other and weren't interesting to be around.

The generated voice was natural sounding but as seems common with synthetic voices the cadence was a bit odd. It had the usual issues with using a single voice for multiple characters.