Stolen Reality

By: Nate Johnson

Narrated by: Danny Hughes

Length: 4 hrs and 35 mins

Publisher's summary

Plague has ravaged the world. The people that remain spend their time immersed in the Games. AI controlled virtual reality. Lost in a fantasy world that make life tolerable. Unfortunately, someone is trapping people online, refusing to let them out. Keeping them there until their bodies wither away.

Gamer extraordinaire, Tor Roberts and Miss Jenny Morgan race across a desolate world to find her father. The one man who might be able to stop this new terror.

©2017 Nate Johnson (P)2018 Nate Johnson

That ending...

This books wasn't for me. It might have been just too teen for me.

Narration: A bit more editing and a better mic or soundproofing would have done well for the performance. The ambient noise levels were a bit high through most of the book, and admittedly I was wearing headphones so I could pick up on that a bit more that someone driving and listening through their stereo. I could live with the noise level itself, but the editing of silence between sentences and paragraphs didn't have any background noise created unsettling drop offs in the audio that pointed out the ambient noise even more when the audio clicked back on. There were also a few repeated words and sentences throughout the reading. The voice was okay, but it was a bit difficult at time to tell which character was talking.

Story: Once again, not for me. I came in expecting a vr scifi close to a gamelit or litrpg and got a teen action/drama story with scifi sprinkled in for effect. The story was okay, but I did find many parts predictable. I also felt much of the narrator's thoughts could have been shorted, as many sentences felt like they repeated the previous sentence's meaning and just said it a different way. Lastly, the ending was a bit dorky, but did buy me a cheap laugh at the end. Don't take the book too seriously and you should be okay.


This book was given to me for free at my request and I provided this voluntary review.

Interesting Futuristic YA Mystery

I see only one Audible review and have to say that my experience was not the same. I also listen with headphones and had no noise issues and did not notice any editing issues. Maybe they fixed it since last year.

I am certainly not YA but I did enjoy this story. It was short enough to finish in one day and interesting enough to want to do so.
I do agree that the narrator did not differentiate voices well. The author chose to alternate point of view between two main characters but broke them up by chapters. Other than the story, there was no way to tell the speaking characters apart based on the narration. This caused some issues at the beginning of the book when it switched from a boy to a girl speaking and I missed the transition. I had to go back and figure out what was happening.

Overall I did enjoy the story. I liked the concept and the issues presented seamed real. I would easily recommend this to anyone interested in YA or even LITRPG although this is definitely not a LITRPG story.

I was given this free review copy audio book at my request and have voluntarily left this review.