Unbroken

Rise of the Masks, Book 2

By: EM Kaplan

Narrated by: TJ Richards

Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins

Publisher's summary

No more broken promises. After fleeing Cillary Keep and fighting trogs in the frozen north, Mel and Ott travel south to the Red Desert to help reunite two sisters.

Rav promised to return to her younger sister, Zunee, who has been left in charge of their family. Trogs, fires, sinkholes, and landslides - do the very elements conspire to keep the sisters apart?

©2016 EM Kaplan (P)2017 EM Kaplan

Fantasy at its best

TJ Richards does an outstanding job of narration in this epic adventure. She brings the characters to life with her verbal skills. The story is fantastic in itself and she adds even more with her talent.

A Very Busy Story

I'm not sure whether it was the fact that it was a "book 2" and really needed the prequel to go before it or whether it was just a difficult book to follow, but I had a real problem keeping track of all of the characters. The action was great, offering elements, nasty Trogs and some interesting heroes, but I kept finding myself saying "wait! Which set of adventurers are we dealing with here. For that reason, and for me, it might have been a better book to read as a text story rather than an audio book so I could have flipped back a page or two, or to the beginning of the chapter so I could sort out which set of characters I was following.
In any case, it's a good story, with lots of great adventure and interesting protagonists. It's just a challenging one.

Steampunk Medieval Apocalypse!

I read at random in a variety of genres but thanks to the Law of Awareness frequently find myself following one story with another similar in tone or texture but by a completely different author. A number of epic sagas have come my way of late, each meticulously crafted so you can feel the winds or numbing cold or choking dust of the world you enter. This book did not fail to satisfy!

But it was an astonishment to me. In the first place, I know the author's work better for the hipster-ironic cozy mysteries she also composes, so was utterly gobsmacked to find myself in a steampunk medieval apocalypse. This is the second volume of the epoch and I would gather the first focuses on our heroine's upbringing and the events tossing her from a closed society out into the broader world. Enough critical detail is provided within this volume, however, that it stands alone quite nicely and concludes satisfactorily. The fact that there are more books simply means the world continues on its path and has new adventures.

I had the pleasure of listening to the AUDIO of "Unbroken" and commend narrator TJ Richards for keeping the action flowing and for her excellent characterizations and vocalizations.