Midst Toil and Tribulation

Safehold Series, Book 6

By: David Weber

Narrated by: Kevin T. Collins

Length: 28 hrs and 23 mins

Publisher's summary

David Weber's New York Times bestselling Safehold series of military Science Fiction adventure, which began with Off Armageddon Reef, continues with Midst Toil and Tribulation

WAR AND FAMINE

Once the Church of God Awaiting dominated all the kingdoms of Safehold. Then, after centuries of stasis, the island kingdom of Charis began to defy the edicts of Mother Church—egged on, some say, by the mysterious warrior-monk Merlin Athrawes, who enjoys the Charisian royal family's absolute trust.

What vanishingly few people know is that Merlin is the cybernetic avatar of a young woman a thousand years dead, felled in the war in which aliens destroyed Earth...and that since awakening, his task has been to restart the history of the long-hidden human race.

Now, reeling from the wars and intrigues that have cascaded from Charis's declaration of independence, the Republic of Siddermark slides into chaos. The Church has engineered a rebellion, and Siddermark's all-important harvest is at risk. King Cayleb and Queen Sharleyan struggle to stabilize their ally, which will mean sending troops—but, even more importantly, preventing famine. For mass starvation in Safehold's breadbasket is a threat even more ominous than civil war...

©2012 David Weber (P)2012 Macmillan Audio

Another good Safehold story, lousy voice actor!

What did you like best about Midst Toil and Tribulation? What did you like least?

Another great story by Weber; progressing the Safehold saga and building the cast and characters.

I usually don't post reviews, but I was so disappointed with the voice acting that I had to say something. Jason Collins is new to the series; Mr Collins' only redeeming feature is that he is clearly spoken. His forced breathless delivery is painful to listen to. He does settle down a bit in the later chapters, but the first 8 hours is positively painful. He has not taken the time to prepare for the reading, having obviously not listened to the previous novels. Almost all of the pronunciation of character and place names has shifted, in some cases to the point where the names are not recognisable. Changing the main character Merlin Athrawes’ name from “A-thra-wes” to “ath-RAWs”, Nimue from “NI-mu” to “Nimu-Ey” and the main protagonist state Charis from “CAr(e)-iss” to “CHar-is” , Chisholm from the very correct "Chi-som(e)" to "Chis-HOME". He is also unable to shift his voice sufficiently to differentiate between characters and the chosen accents and voices are not consistent through the work. I wonder if the producer has also changed (or possibly dropped the ball) on this rendition?

Please bring back Charles Keating or Jason Culp!

A necessary step towards the ultimate conclusion

Would you try another book from David Weber and/or Kevin T. Collins?

Absolutely!

How would you have changed the story to make it more enjoyable?

Omit redundant details.

What about Kevin T. Collins’s performance did you like?

Well, he pronounced the character names a little too accurately for my taste. Weber purposely misspells all the names on Safehold so that they sound similar to common english names, but I always read them like common names, it was a little offputting to hear the narrator rigidly adhere to the "proper" annunciation, no matter how torturous :-)

Do you think Midst Toil and Tribulation needs a follow-up book? Why or why not?

Yes, this book is just a chapter in the entire story. It is an exceedingly LONG, boring, redundantly depicted and narrated chapter, but nonetheless, its required reading if you are to finish the Safehold series.

Any additional comments?

Generally, this book moves slowly, and has lots of unnecessary and redundant detail. David Weber seems to forget that his audience that has worked it's way through half a dozen of these massive books is probably smart enough not to have to have a flintlock rifle or steam ship described in excruciating detail every 5 pages. We get it!

Pronunciation!!

This is the editor's fault. Please make sure pronunciation is consistent. It takes away from the reading/listening experience to have to translate from book to book.

Too much blah blah blah

in what would have been one of the best books of the series the author wants to get bogged down excruciating and I do mean excruciating explanations any number of minutiae and overly detailed conversations. Then, combined with narrators pedantic tone it was almost unlistenable. Almost. Like I said it still comes close to one of the best books of the series.

Good story, poor reader

This is the third reader for the story, and definitely my least favorite. Although Collins carries energy in his voice I can't shake the feeling he will start crying in anguish at any moment... Very distracting...

Writer changes

The orator for the first 3-4 books was decent, then the guy who read the last book was great. This orator sucks, tries to be overly dramatic for every single line, whether it’s supposed to be or not. Seems like the guy took one too many theatre classes.

Come on David Weber. Don’t pinch pennies and hire someone decent to read your books. I’m not sure I’m even going to finish this book.

still a good series so far

the thing I've disliked most is the changing of the narrator multiple times. idk if it was this story or the last book the pronunciation of names changed to. it kinda throws the flow off a bit, but it's tolerable.

STOP CHANGING NARRATORS!

I'm not the only one. the shift from one narrator to another destroys the continuity of the story. I'd much rather wait a little longer for the "right" narrator. the story is ruined when the sequel has the tone, pronunciation, and voices completely change. DON'T DO THAT!!

Bad voice actor, good story.

Bad voice actor, good story I don’t know why all the names were miss pronounced, but it’s still a good story.

I'm losing hope.

I see that nearly every reviewer has complained about the narrator. I too have complaints about him. It’s bad enough that he didn’t familiarize himself with the pronunciations of names and places in the previous books. But he also mispronounced English words. The most jarring one for me was “demesne”, which is used several times. He pronounced it dih-mez-nay. The correct pronunciation, which anyone can hear for free from Dictionary dot com, is dih-meyn.

However, I don’t care to put all the blame on poor Kevin Collins. He should have had a team to help him. I put more blame on David Weber and Macmillan Audio. I recently read a blog post by Lois McMaster Bujold in which she mentioned that she had just gotten off the phone with Grover Gardner who narrates her Vorkosigan series books. They talk before each new book so that he knows how she wants things pronounced. Why didn’t Weber/Macmillan do that? It seems like it would be so simple and easy. The fact that they don’t bother to do it, and don’t bother to create some continuity in narrators, seems to indicate that they don’t care about us, the listeners.

I have another gripe that seems to stem from the same disregard for those of us who purchase our books in either the Kindle or the Audible form: MAPS. In the front of each hard cover copy of the book, there are maps. If you can’t follow the action of the story on a map, much is lost in these books. Events are occurring in many places that are far apart from one another. That is why the maps are there for hard copy readers. But WE are left out in the cold. I have seen, on the main page for some Audible books, a notice telling the listener a web address they can access in order to see tables or photos that are in the print book. It seems like it would be so simple for Macmillan or Weber to post the maps for this book online, but they didn’t bother.

It makes me angry and sad.

Now to the story itself: I don’t know. I felt sort of depressed, angry, repulsed throughout the book. Some of it was because of the map thing and the narrator thing. But some of it was from all the torture and hatred. At least Weber didn’t go into the details of the torture in this book like he did in the last one, but it gets mentioned on practically every third page. All that hate just didn’t make for a fun read.

And some of it was a sense of hopelessness that this story will ever go anywhere and accomplish anything. As I finished the first book, I naively expected the second book in the series to take place some hundreds of years in the future after the changes Merlin had set into motion had time to mature and change the society. But no, each book seems to give us the events of a single year, and still it seems that it will take hundreds of years for the necessary changes to take place. I won’t be around for hundreds of books in this series, and neither will Mr. Weber. Will his descendants hire ghost writers to finish the series for him? If so, I won’t be reading them.

Well, I’ve got to stop. If you have read and liked the previous books in this series, you probably want to read this one too. Just don’t get your hopes up too much.