Schism

By: Catherine Asaro

Narrated by: Suzanne Weintraub

Length: 13 hrs and 58 mins

Publisher's summary

Schism (Triad, Book I) is the tenth novel in Catherine Asaro's multiple-award-winning Skolian saga, and represents an excellent entry point into the series. An epic story of how the Ruby Dynasty reached maturity, Triad, divided into two books, reveals how a war of galactic proportions first explodes between two great empires.

Schism is how it all began, harkening back to the early years of the Skolian Empire, back to the beginning of the war between Skolia and the Euban Traders. Twenty-three years have passed since the fateful vote in the Skolian Assembly that Roca missed in Skyfall. It created the first open hostility between Eube and Skolia, which has only deepened in the ensuing years.

Now Eube senses an opportunity, for strife has riven the first family of the Skolian Empire. Sauscony, the daughter of Roca and Eldrinson, is ready to seek her fortune as an officer-in-training in the Skolian military. When her father forbids her to undertake such a dangerous path, a rupture develops as Soz chooses duty over family. Eube hopes to make this divide permanent, leaving the Empire ripe for conquest. And they're willing to kill anyone to make it happen.

©2010 Catherine Asaro (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

The p is psilent!

However well Catherine Asaro may write, something is to be desired in the performance done during this book by the narrator. Truly awful. The P is silent. Unfortunately the narrator does not seem to understand this theme among any of the words in this book. And in fact by not enunciating correctly she has ruined my experience throughout this entire book.

Loved it except...

"Psion" has a silent "P" !!!

Another great story in a wonderful universe, but I cringed every time I heard the "puh-sion", and in this universe that makes for a lot of cringes. Still, very worth the listen.

Kept me interested. Great series

FIRST. I like the narrator but PLEASE say the word psion correctly! The "P" is silent. It is Sy-On NOT Pah-Sy-On." I found the mispronunciation really, really painful and distracting throughout the book. This is a story about Shannon, Soz, and more of the Ruby dynasty. Compelling series. I just bought the next one.

#SF #Mindbending #Funny #Clever # SF Series #tagsgiving #sweepstakes

Narrator... sucks

How is this even possible? How did a person who doesn't know how to pronounce neutrino, auxiliary, betrothed, behemoth, psion (There were more. That's all I can think of at the moment.) -- How did this person ever imagine that she was qualified to work as a narrator? And how about the producer? How did the producer not step in and say Stop! This person doesn't know how to pronounce basic English words. This person is not qualified to read audiobooks. Yikes, Audible. This is not okay.

Pu-sions

Good in general. Good story and reading mostly. But please correct the puh-sions pronunciation it’s horrendous.

Great Story, Terrible Narrator for Sci-Fi

I've been enjoying this whole series, and I never write a negative review, but my goodness this was the worst narration I've ever heard for a science fiction book! I understand that names or other pronunciations will change with different narrators in the same series and that's hard to avoid, but every technical term was just butchered throughout the book!

The worst was "Piss-eye-on" for psyon... like, how did no one on the recording team not mention, hey, maybe that p is silent? I realize it's not a super common weird in every day conversation perhaps, but in science fiction it, or some derivative is all over the place! And 3/4 of the book "Quasis is "quah-sis" until it's explained to be "quantum stasis"and suddenly the rest of the book is correct. But no one went back to fix the rest??!

It really pulled me out of the story regularly. I would request my money back, but I want the author to get the money she deserves. I REALLY hope it's a different narrator for the next one though...

this narrator drives me uP the wall

the P in psion is silent!!!!
but she ENUNCIATES every single silent p in the whole book.
the were so many mispronounced words that I had to replay to try to figure out what was said based on context clues because I couldn't even understand what she had intended the word to be.
narrators really need to know how to pronounce the material they are supposed to be reading,
and editors should be catching this.

need a pronunciations guide for consistency

I swear that if there were any more psion words pronounced with the p sound I am going to skip the rest of the series

Simply checked narration mistakes badly detracts

I've listened to this entire series before it came to Audible and loved it. Suzanne Weintraub has a great voice, but destroys the pronunciation of so many words it severely detracts from the story. I found myself grumbling about the words and missing more than 2 minutes of it requiring me to rewind. While I love All of Asaro's SF books, I found myself ready to just quit listening. I, like so many others, am baffled at how this escaped editing.

Terrible reader

The world is interesting and the characters varied. Unfortunately the reader is awful. I found a Suzanne Weintraub who reads medical texts and narrates commercials. That explains her bland and robotic reading and the fact that she never makes an effort to distinguish between the different characters. There is no distinction between the narrative and dialog either. However that doesn’t explain her many mispronunciation including common words but the most egregious is sounding the p in psion (she pronounces psion posion). Surely she knows how to pronounce psychology? It wouldn't have been half as annoying if not for the hundreds of occurrences of the word. I particularly dislike narrators who are too lazy to find out how to properly pronounce words that they are unfamiliar with. I shudder to think her reading of medical texts which are bound to have even more unfamiliar words.

The editing of the audiobook isn't that great either. Narrator read a couple of sentences twice and it wasn't edited out. Bizarre.

These audiobooks would be so much more enjoyable if they are re-recorded with a different reader.