Rampage

Land of the Elementals

By: Aaron Oster

Narrated by: Annie Ellicott, Justin Thomas James, Dorrie Sacks, Jeff Hays

Length: 16 hrs and 27 mins

Publisher's Summary

Life is cruel. Arbor learns this lesson the hard way, when everything he loves is taken from him in a single night. Left alive by the men who butchered his family, Arbor has two options: give up and perish, or rise up and fight to take back the life he's lost. To do that though, he'll have to leave behind the only home he's ever known and venture out into the world beyond.

What he doesn't yet realize, is that the world is a much more dangerous place than he could ever have imagined. A world filled with magic, monsters and mythic beasts powerful enough to destroy entire nations!

Warning: Contains mild profanity and content that may not be suitable for children.

©2019 Aaron Oster (P)2020 Soundbooth Theater

A compelling story marred by lazy writing and inconsistent editing.

I did really enjoy this story. So it’s unfortunate that it is so consistently inconsistent. I was regularly pulled from the storyline by lazy writing cliche’s and editing fails.

The author repeatedly uses clunky, one-sentence, backstory justifications for why a character says or does something that seems stupid or incongruous. Which just feels like he couldn’t be bothered to set up the characters and the world properly.

He also seemed to be compulsively directed to use the same bad-horror-movie trope of having the characters be distracted by something in the middle of a life or death fight, which inevitably adds fake drama to the situation by giving the bad guy the upper hand. He did this in literally every single fight... often more than once in the same scene. It was so bad I felt like I was watching fight scenes from the original, live-action Batman TV show.

Finally, this book was just poorly edited, both for word choice, content, and factual consistency.

The Soundbooth Theater narration was about what I have come to expect when Jeff Hayes is not the lead performer... which is to say it was pretty good, but nowhere near as well done as when Jeff Hayes is at the helm, i.e., bad/unnecessary sound effects, editing issues, and over-dramatized exclamations and performances.

All in all, I would still recommend this book to Oster fans, but if you’re the kind of person who has a hard time staying engaged through clunky writing and editing this may not be worth your time. For me this is an extremely rare example of a poorly executed story that still has an interesting enough plot and characters to keep me listening till the end.

I’ll probably check out the next book, though if the prose and story editing aren’t improved it’s unlikely I’ll make it to the third book.

A lot of walking around for a book called rampage.

I'm going to start with the good. the performance was great as it always is with soundbooth studios, and if you liked the supermage series you'll probably enjoy this one.

However, the character are kind of bland and a lot of things just dont add up, and cant be explained away even with magic. It's more like in some situations the characters straight up know things they shouldn't. Also theres a lot of, "behold this thing or person has a dark and mysterious secret but I'm not going to tell you want it is only that it's dark and mysterious." which honestly just get annoying. Finally I'd like to point out that there is surprisingly little murder for a book called rampage, just saying.

ok

narration was great 5 stars.
Story was OK but very blank.
Story needed more polishing.

Fantastic production

This book is what I would imagine would happen if Braveheart had a baby with Harry Potter. There are strong motives of revenge mixed with a cool, original magic system. The world creation is really well down and I am excited to see what happens in subsequent book. The characters are really well written and the narration really brings them to life. It never ceases to amaze me the quality of Soundbooth Theater’s productions. Everything from full cast to sound effects takes the books that they work on to another level.

excellent story, poor editing

loved the story but the performance was messed up quite a bit from bad editing. or maybe someone just thought it was a good idea... anytime there was a deep voice talking it would be interrupted halfway through the dialogue by the narrator. that is one of the dumbest things I've listened to and it's a shame this happened in one of Aaron's books. the voice actor's themselves however were fantastic.

No regular person is this stupid or dense

Has promise yet MCs seem to do the dumbest things when it matters most. They also have odd moral dilemmas in a world where they were raised not to have any. it's almost as if the MCs want to die or hit rock bottom before something magical pulls them back from the brink. it's sloppy writing and unrealistic. characters having experienced so many cruel life setbacks wouldn't simply forget that the world is cruel.

Repetitive same story behavior

I have gotten to book 4 and the same thing repeats. All the characters are never in the right place. It never stops, and the romances are all PSYCH!

Author couldn't commit

So, this story starts off pretty dark as indicated by the blurb, but the author couldn't commit and keep this story on a darkish revenge/vengeance quest that it started with. Which is fine given this is a series, and I'm not into grimdark stuff, but at the same time, the story got sidetracked with several side plots, character inconsistencies. contriviances, Deux ex Machina, plot armor, and unexplained events. For the most part, it's an entertaining story if you can get over a few things.

The MC's Arbor and Karria are written like infuriating children. First, let me stop here and say I'm decades older than a YA and this is the second YA novel I chose to indulge in. So, there's that. But I was once a teenager, once 15 and 18, same ages as both MC's and I didn't do half the things they did just in normal everyday life interacting with girls, etc.

For example, Arbor will acknowledge a woman is making advances at him, you're made aware of this because he feels guilty about his lost loved one, but turn right around in the same scene and act like he doesn't understand why the woman is acting the way she is, saying the things she is, etc. Both will demand answers to questions but the author wouldn't have them process the information they were given. Yet, Arbor somehow could figure out how to magically use, well his magic without any actual training. This became the culprit of much plot armor, Deus ex Machina salvations, and unexplained events. Yes, even when the author decided to explain it to you after the fact.

Character inconsistencies. The biggest culprit of this is the elf boy, Sylvester. When you first meet him he seems like an honorable and kind kid. In fact, you're told a few times that he has such a kind heart that he just can't stomach killing someone or having them killed, even if the person deserves it, or it will serve the greater good to get rid of an extremely dangerous person. Yet, at some point in the story, he turns into a compulsive liar, one who harms Karria through his lies despite his supposedly "oh so kind heart" and all for the sake of creating drama between Karria and a handful of new characters. Drama that doesn't even last that long. And his reason for doing so remains unexplained for the entirety of the story. Not in a mysterious sort of way, but in a "the author couldn't be bothered to explain it" sort of way.

Sylvester is also the culprit of the most infuriating point in the book. As stated he has such a kind heart that he talks someone down from taking out an enraged dangerous person who let them know before he caused the foolish action, that she wasn't going to simply stop trying to kill them. In fact, because of him, she gets the upper hand and even after that, he goes out of his way to stop someone from killing her accomplice, who was also eager to try to kill someone.

At the end, the author seemed to forget another character's plotline that he started at the beginning of the final battle. Whether or not it was haphazard, last-minute editing, we'll likely never know. But one of the side characters goes off to get reinforcements, but never comes back. I believe the author forgot in favor of having the MC have an outlandish duel with a random, literally conjured up big bad at the end who had nothing to do with anything that was going on. Given how another supposed big bad was diminished as a supposed twist, I suspect that's also what this was, but the aforementioned plotline was completely forgotten. I suspect when I pick up book 2, it might resurface, but who knows.

Overall, as I said, this wasn't a horrid story. Soundbooth theater did a good job with the narration. I quite prefer that male narrators do male voices and female narrators do female voices. Sadly, you can't find too many stories across multiple genres that embrace that type of narration.

love all 3 books so far but...

narration is fantastic overall story is pretty good but the Main Street characters sister kharia, gets more petulent and annoying the longer you read, and as much as I know she becomes as powerful as her brother she is the main reason I dont give the book 5 stars. shes pushy in times where she shouldnt be, not when she should.

maybe its just me but her whole character just makes me want to put the book away

good for the most part

book was good until the part with the elemental(couldn't understand a word it was saying)

awesome.

amazing work. Aaron oster once again hits it out of the ball park. keep up the good work.