The Shuttle

By: Frances Hodgson Burnett

Narrated by: Tabi That

Length: 19 hrs and 44 mins

Publisher's Summary

Rosalie Vanderpoel, the daughter of an American multimillionaire marries an impoverished English baronet and goes to live in England. She all but loses contact with her family in America. Years later her younger sister Bettina, beautiful, intelligent and extremely rich, goes to England to find what has happened to her sister. She finds Rosalie shabby and dispirited, cowed by her husband's ill-treatment. Bettina sets about to rectify matters. She meets Lord Mount Dunstan, an impoverished earl, who lives nearby and they fall in love, but he cannot speak because it would look as if he were after her money.

©2017 SAGA Egmont (P)2017 SAGA Egmont

More than Lovely

The narrator, who I have heard before, is very good if a bit fast..this is not a bad thing for a book written just at the turn of the last century as it keeps the book from becoming dull.
As usual in Burnett’s Adult books, this is not a great huge book, it is instead an intimate one. A bad marriage between a cruel man and a woman who is not strong is well shown, and her sister is a wonderful “new age” woman who comes from America and implements changes to save her sister and the entailed estate to which her son is heir. Just desserts are served in satisfactory portions and in the end there is happiness although Burnett never lets you forget what damage old-fashioned anti-woman laws can do. A good little reminder of things currently happening today.

Amazing

Great writing. Enjoyable to enter and journey along with plot. Brilliant understanding of complex mental illness and evil. Love all her stories!

Great story, disappointing narrator.

I’ve enjoyed several other audio books by this author, (Frances Hodgson Burnett) but was so disappointed with the narration. It was like listening to a news bulletin being recited for hours on end...

Enjoyable!

I enjoyed this book, but it was sooo long. If two words would suffice, a paragraph was used. I realize when this was written, comments on society were interspersed within the story. This makes the story seem slow today. Still, a good listen.

A Classic

Oh this was a gift to listen to. it is read, not narrated, and I think recorded some time ago. I turned the speed down to 90% for easier listening, but relished every sentence. Written perhaps 100 hundred years ago, and still of relevance. Thoughtful, a slow story, that took me into its world for 20 hours of my week of books.

The Shuttle

I could not stand listening any more. I stuck it out until chapter 6 but the background interference got increasingly worse. Added to this the monotonous tone of the reader’s voice and her insistence of introducing each chapter with the full title of the book and the name of the author drove me to distraction and l found myself shouting at the i pad. I think someone should listen to this recording to see what l mean. It is awful

killed by narrator - sorry!

I have no idea if the story is any good - I'm sure it is! but just can't listen to the way this is read (feel like it's Siri reading it!) my apologies!! going to return.

Fast narration, recording quality low

This is another excellent story by Frances Hodgson Burnett and I definitely recommend it.

The narration is reasonable, but very fast (I had to slow it down to 0.8 playback speed to make it tolerable) and the narrator clearly has no understanding that ingenious and ingenuous are two completely different words with very different meanings. She consistently says ingenious when she should say ingenuous and this makes no sense whatsoever in the context. For instance, we are told in almost the same sentence that one of the characters is both slow witted and 'ingenious', when she is, in fact, slow witted and ingenuous. Therefore, when listening to this book I find myself mentally editing it, as unfortunately 'ingenuous' is one of Frances Hodgson Burnett's favourite words.

I would really like to hear this book read by a better narrator (Juliet Stevenson would be my choice), but as, at the time of writing, this is currently the only version available on Audible, it is better than nothing.

The last point that needs to be mentioned is that the recording quality is very poor. At some point near the beginning voices can be heard mumbling in the background, and a few hours into the book birds can clearly be heard chirping in the background. This goes on for a long time. This book doesn't sound as if this was recorded in a studio but in someone's garden or summerhouse. It is not of a professional recording quality, so this too needs to be borne in mind when considering purchasing this audiobook.