• The Kingdom of Ohio

  • A Novel
  • By: Matthew Flaming
  • Narrated by: Todd McLaren
  • Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
  • 2.9 out of 5 stars (22 ratings)

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The Kingdom of Ohio  By  cover art

The Kingdom of Ohio

By: Matthew Flaming
Narrated by: Todd McLaren
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Editorial reviews

Matthew Flaming’s debut novel The Kingdom of Ohio is a sometimes disjointed mix of fantasy and history, with a setting only slightly off from the America we all know. In Flaming’s version, the titular monarchy developed when a French nobleman was sold a parcel of land in what later became Toledo, Ohio, and it’s from this region that Cheri-Anne Toledo, a descendent of its original ruler, emerges in 1900. Cheri-Anne finds herself in New York City in the company of Peter Force, a young man working on the tunnels that would become the New York City subway system. With her conviction that she has traveled in time from seven years in the past, Cheri-Anne enlists Peter’s help to prove her claims.

All of this is framed by the musings of an unnamed present-day guide, who provides plenty of historical-sounding citations for his account of Peter and Cheri-Anne’s encounters with the likes of Nicola Tesla, Thomas Edison, and J.P. Morgan. Narrator Todd McLaren shines best in the book’s first-person sections, his warm tones providing the perfect context for this weary but eager storyteller. In the framing segments that mostly come at the beginning of each chapter, McLaren sounds less like a reader than a friendly, welcoming raconteur.

He stumbles a bit with the various foreign accents required by the range of characters in turn-of-the-century New York, and has a habit of using an irritating breathy tone when voicing characters’ inner thoughts. Still, he mostly navigates Flaming’s meandering story well, drawing the listener in to tales of the beginnings of the Ohio kingdom, Peter’s youth on the Idaho frontier, and the bitter rivalry between Tesla and Edison. McLaren also does what he can with Flaming’s copious, often superfluous footnotes, but reading them aloud has a tendency to disrupt the story’s momentum.

Those stumbling blocks aside, Kingdom is an often engrossing experience with a nice sense of wonder, even if Flaming’s prose is sometimes a little florid. It illustrates a world of possibilities just behind our everyday reality, and McLaren’s performance makes that world come alive. —Josh Bell

Publisher's summary

After discovering an old photograph, an elderly antiques dealer living in present-day Los Angeles is forced to revisit the history he has struggled to deny. The photograph depicts a man and a woman. The man is Peter Force, a young frontier adventurer who comes to New York City in 1901 and quickly lands a job digging the first subway tunnels beneath the metropolis. The woman is Cheri-Anne Toledo, a beautiful mathematical prodigy whose memories appear to come from another world. They meet seemingly by chance, and Peter initially dismisses her as crazy. But as they are drawn into a tangle of overlapping intrigues, Peter must reexamine Cheri-Anne's fantastic story. Could it be that she is telling the truth and that she has stumbled onto the most dangerous secret imaginable: the key to traveling through time? Set against the mazelike streets of New York at the dawn of the mechanical age, Peter and Cheri-Anne find themselves wrestling with the nature of history, technology, and the unfolding of time itself.
©2010 Matthew Flaming (P)2009 Tantor

Critic reviews

"The journey through the seedier side of New York's Gilded Age...is an arresting contrast to classic time-travel themes. This is a real crowd-pleaser." (Publishers Weekly)

What listeners say about The Kingdom of Ohio

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    5 out of 5 stars

Written as if coming from another time

I really enjoyed this book. The jumps from present time to reminiscing about his past took getting used to, but when you realize its an old man telling the story of his past, it is easy to understand. It moved well and the characters were people you could empathize with.
Speculative fiction, classic romance, historical novel. Its got it all and Todd McLaren could make a laundry list sound good.

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4 people found this helpful