The Mad Lancers

A Powder Mage Novella

By: Brian McClellan

Narrated by: Julie Hoverson

Length: 3 hrs and 28 mins

Publisher's summary

In the colonial cities and towns of Fatrasta, peace has never been easy. Immigrants fight amongst themselves or turn on the native population, while the governing power of the Kez Army steps in only to enforce the will of apathetic local governors assigned by a distant crown.

Young war hero Ben Styke commands a colonial garrison in a sleepy frontier suburb. When the governor's cruel brother stops for the night, rising continental tensions force Styke to protect the people of his town in a brutal escalation that threatens to destroy everything and everyone he has fought for.

Occurs 12 years before the events in Sins of Empire.

©2017 Brian McClellan (P)2017 Brian McClellan

Mad Lancers, Madder Major

Another great entry in the powdermage world! The short novela doesn't skip on the action but more importantly gives plunges you headfirst into a complex continent and has you crying for revolution in minutes.

great book

it was a great story. the onlt real negative was I wanted it to be longer! wish they had the same narrator for the other Brian McClellan powder mage trilogy and Gods of Blood and Powder trilogy.

Good story bad casting

Feel like casting person chose Judi Dench to play John Rambo. Not the best option for the voice actor.

Enjoyable addition

Enjoyable backstory for an interesting minor character from the first series...I assume he'll have a bigger role in the next.

I wasn't sure about the narration at first but felt it worked by the end.

Great Backstory

Really enjoyed this Mad Lancers origin story. Author has a -knack- for telling a harrowing tale without drifting into the macabre or reveling in depictions of suffering. Makes his books enjoyable rather than traumatic.

Good story but less than stellar delivery

Similar to the other reviews: The story is great & the narrator isn't. In her defence, a majority (not all) of the specific criticisms are coming from people who can tell there is an issue but their criticism does seem sexist in that it (a) doesn't get at the actual problems & (b) isn't criticism I see leveled at male voice actors who have the same issues they say she has. However, Julie Hoverson did make real mistakes with this audio that I'm not seeing identified in many reviews. That said, especially for a short read, I'd still listen to it if you're a fan of the series & are okay with slogging through it for a day or two.

The fact that she has a limited pitch range for male voices isn't really an issue for me. Many voice actors have limited ranges and their voices for characters of a different gender don't sound "believable" either. But that's never been a serious issue as long as characters are distinctly characterized in their voice & dialogue.

For example, Christian Rodska (who narrates the other works in this series) has a similarly limited range for female characters. It's often noticeable for the first few lines. However, he's able to take advantage of other methods for characterizing voices so that listeners quickly forget pitch issues and you can forget that it's a man voicing a woman. Hoverson does not do this, which warrants criticism, but her lack of vocal range for opposite-gender characters is clearly not a valid criticism if the same "issue" isn't an issue for listeners of Rodska.

While I'm sure Julie Hoverson is talented and some of the specific criticisms are unfair, but it isn't unfair that people feel there are serious issues. Here are the two problems that stick out to me:

1) Insufficient attention paid to characterization
2) Sharp contradictions between how characters are said to deliver dialogue and how Julie delivers it

-Characterization-
This is the issue I think most people are noticing, especially when they claim the issue is a lack of vocal range and believe a male actor would be better. But vocal pitch isn't the issue here. Christian Rodska, who has a similar problem, deftly gets around this by using other methods of changing his speech to characterize people in the story.

Take the voices of Styke & Bly for example. There's a slight difference in the quality of Hoverson's voice for each, with the former being more "gravelly". But they speak with the same accent, speed, and prosody. It's not a bad decision to use the same accent for both, but the fact that the latter two are identical and the difference in voice quality is slight makes it difficult to tell the two apart.

-Delivering Dialogue-
For a voice actor, there is a lot of room to give your spin on the story through how characters deliver their dialogue. This is especially the case when delivery isn't specified in the text and there are multiple ways to read how the character is speaking. When the text *does* specify how a character should speak, voice actors are much more limited. This is an issue for Hoverson.

There are several instances where the dialogue is said to be delivered one way & Hoverson delivers it another way. For one example, a character is described as saying something mechanically while Hoverson chose to deliver it with some kind of emotion instead. The contrast between the dialogue and both the text as well as the scene was jarring. This happened in a few places.

in some of the places that Hoverson was not directly given instruction by the text, it seems that her choices of delivery were not informed by the scene's context. There are moments when characters are somber, serious, or angry but the dialogue is delivered with something between sarcasm & haughty amusement. I won't share spoilers but there are some scenes where I was completely ripped out of the scene due to how unrealistically it seemed characters were reacting to what's going on around them.


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Again, I don't think any of this means that Julie Hoverson doesn't have talent or that people shouldn't listen to her works. These are all things that can be fixed with a little more planning & thought about how to express characters and their emotions before voice recording actually starts.

Great story, narrator is good but odd fit

After binging through both Powder Mage trilogies back to back, this is the first of the novellas I read. The story is fantastic, wonder origin story for the Mad Lancers and some of my favorite characters from gods of powder. The narrator was a bit of an odd choice though, and was a bit of a jarring change to the previous narrators. She does a good job, but does not have as much vocal range for the predominantly male cast of this book so characters can tend to blend together a bit. Fully recommend reading or listening to this one, but recommend to buy and not waste a credit as it is under 4 hours long.

Not worth the credit , and it pains me to say it.

I am a huge fan of this series and can not wait for the next full book... but I could barely get through this audio book because of the narration. The sad part is that this fatal flaw was completely avoidable because this is the same reader the author has had read all his short novellas and the feedback from listeners could not have been more straight forward and brutal that the reader was killing his story. I don't know if he didn't care to listen to the fan base of his new book series or if he had no choice. But this is the last chance I give to a book read by this person and I sure hope that doesn't keep me from buying the next audio book in this series... but I just can not take another book read by her even if it is a great book.

Good story, terrible narrator.

The whole novel feels forced do to the narrator's style. As if she wanted to be a man, and not just for the characters, but during the narration itself. Very annoying. Luckily the novel is short and the story makes up for it.

Worst narration ever but fun story.

Love these stories, wish they were longer. Please get a better narrator I did not buy others because of it.