You Slay Me

Aisling Grey, Guardian, Book 1

By: Katie MacAlister

Narrated by: Barbara Rosenblat

Length: 10 hrs and 32 mins

Publisher's summary

You Slay Me is a lusty romance novel with amusing supernatural undercurrents. When courier Aisling Grey is dispatched to Paris to deliver a priceless dragon statue to a rich and eccentric female collector, she finds the intended recipient the apparent victim of a demonic ritual. And that's just the beginning of Aisling's discoveries.

Spend some more time with Aisling Grey.

©2004 Martha Arends (P)2005 Recorded Books, LLC

Critic reviews

"Wickedly witty." ( Booklist)

Distracting background noise!

Honestly the story is great. The narrator is not so bad the only problem is it sounds like she's constantly chewing gum through the whole book. The audio is so clear you here every page turn every smacked lip, and swallow she makes but other than that it a good book.

Hilarious!!

Where does You Slay Me rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

This book rates pretty high on my list.

What other book might you compare You Slay Me to and why?

The author adds great humor to the characters and the story, which is pretty similar to the humor found in Molly Harper's stories.

What about Barbara Rosenblat’s performance did you like?

It added just the right amount of quirky likability to the main characters personality.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Absolutely!

Any additional comments?

The sidekick demons added great comic relief to an all together entertaining story.

Silly Story - Mouth Noise

Silly story, comic relief, dumb fun,
The mouth noises are very distracting. I almost gave up a couple times. Listening at a lower volume, faster speed; and, on car or house speaker helped. So far second book is much better.

The Good and the Bad

I feel forced to critique the story and the performance seperately, considering the fact that they competed with each other the entire time. I loved the story. I loved that the paranormal aspects did not overwhelm the story but added to it. I loved that there was plenty of suspense and heat. I loved each and every one of Aisling's sidekicks even when they were more hinderance than help. I loved Aisling's sense of humor and how she makes things harder on herself. I really enjoyed Drake, I liked how he let Aisling solve her own problems without stepping in and making things easy for her. I especially enjoyed the "other world" Ms. MacAlister created and was sorry to leave but I am looking forward to visiting again in subsequent books.

After this glowing review I need to address why I only gave this story four stars. I had a huge problem with the narration. I'm not sure if it was a problem with the narrator, the production, the direction or all three but at points I had to turn the story off and walk away I was so frustrated. During the entire performance you can hear the narrator swilling spittle around her mouth, constantly, every few seconds. It is disgusting and distracting and I could not get past it. I ended up listening to the story at such a low level to try to block that out but struggled with hearing the words. Also, the narrator read certain parts of the story like a stereotypically old-time gangster, mumble mumble out the side of the cheek 'ya see. She used this tone of voice whenever she was delivering a punch line or in times of duress and passion. In the end even though the story was amazing I just couldn't get past the narration.

It was OK.

I read this book before I listened to it on audio. Should have not done the audio. The narrator sounded like she was eating or sucking on candy the whole time, and her accents were not all that good- admittedly, how many people would know what a Welsh accent sounds like? It doesn't sound like they got to Wales via Jamaica, though.

The content of the book is a good story, well written and entertaining- I've read the whole series and enjoyed it. If they change up the narrator in the subsequent issues, it would be worth checking out, but this reader makes a good story painful. Too bad.

Dragon Scales and Puppydog Tails

I want me a Jim for the laughs and a Drake for...(well,use your imagination).Absolutely loved the story.Funny,entertaining,sexy, inventive and the narration was awesome.Can’t wait to listen to the next book in the series.Love the whole supernatural crew.

Story is great, narrator not so much

Any additional comments?

First of all, I read the book before I listened to the audiobook and the book is great. However, the narrator is only ok, bordering on bad, for the following reasons:

1. her voice sounds a bit whiny, which gets annoying
2. she tries to add inflections to her voice, probably to indicate emotions, but it just makes the main character sound abosolutely silly and ridiculous.
3. The voice she used for Jim is absolutely awful. Part of Jim's charm is the sarcastic tone in which he delivers his lines. She uses a voice that makes him sound like a clown, rather than sarcastic. I don't think she really understands.
4. Whenever the author switches to Jim's voice, she pauses and you can hear her suck spit into her mouth and swallow it. Disgusting and very distracting.
5. You can constantly hear the author swallowing and she pauses for long stretches of time at the wrong moments.
6. Her accents are bad. The most egregious one is what is supposed to be her English accent, which is one of the easiest ones to do. Hers, on the other hand, sounds like an Indian accent, rather than an English one.

Overall, not a good choice on narrator, although she's a little better for the Silver Dragons series, although the voices she chooses for the supporting characters still aren't good. Jim's voice just drives me nuts.

cute and fun

It took me a while to get into this story because although I think the narrator is very good at creating character voices, I didn't think her husky older sounding voice fit the personality of Aisling. It just kept bugging me all through the recording.

Another thing that bothered me was the constant rustling of paper in the background and the swallowing noises of the reader. It actually sounded like she was eating or sucking on candy or something. I don't ever remember listening to another book with so much saliva swallowing in it ever. Even though the story was good, I kept having to fight my way through it because of the narrator. I think she would be really really good if she can learn how not to rustle the paper of the script and tone down or edit the very loud swishing and swallowing in her mouth. yuck

Enjoyed this book

I enjoyed this listen and plan on downloading the next book. Its a little cheesy here and there but I still liked it quite a bit. I liked the narrator though others are right you can hear her swallow here and there. Any decent editor should be able to get rid of that! Usually I am working out when I'm listening so I didn't hear it much and it didn't bother me but it is there. I thought other then the swallowing bit she had a good voice and it was clear between characters.

Funny, sexy, and about dragons!

This was a funny book about a middle-aged woman named Ashling Grey who gets a courier job from her Uncle to deliver a dragon statue to France. Upon her arrival she meets up with a French cab driver who insists on teaching her strange French phrases like: There is a frog in the bidet.

When Ashling goes to deliver the statue she finds the lady dead. Not only is she dead, but she has been murdered and there is a strange man in the apartment that steals her statue! The police arrive to find Ashiling with the dead lady and promptly haul her in for questioning. After a while they release her, but hold her passport so she cannot leave. She decides to set out and find the man who stole her statue and clear her name.

I was pulled into the dragon world along with our accidental heroine as she learned about this whole new world of dragons, demons and magic. Along the way she conjures up Jim, a demon dog who has a wicked appetite. She will learn more strange French phrases and even put some of them to use as she makes her way around Paris and around this strange new world.

I really enjoyed this story. Katie MacAlister did a great job of introducing us to this magical world of dragons. I liked that there wasn’t a whole new vocabulary that I had to learn in order to understand the book. We learned everything as Ashling did. I also liked that not everything was revealed in this book. Gives me something to look forward to in book #2.

I really enjoyed the romance between Ashling and Drake. He was convinced she should just submit and she was more like… I don’t think so.

On the Narration:
Barbara Rosenblat did a great job of creating different voices for different characters. I love her voices for Jim and Drake.