The Twenty-Seventh City

By: Jonathan Franzen

Narrated by: Meetu Chilana

St. Louis, Missouri, is a quietly dying river city until it hires a new police chief: a charismatic young woman from Bombay, India, named S. Jammu. No sooner has Jammu been installed, though, than the city's leading citizens become embroiled in an all-pervasive political conspiracy. A classic of contemporary fiction, The Twenty-Seventh City shows us an ordinary metropolis turned inside out, and the American dream unraveling into terror and dark comedy.

©1988 Jonathan Franzen (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

Distracting reader.

The reader mispronounces so many words, it's distracting. She places emphasis in the wrong places and often doesn't seem to understand the story. Not good.

ok

The story is good, but not riveting. The narrator is distracting. Too many words are mispronounced, badly. Maybe English isn't her first language, but , look it up!

Not my favorite Franzen

I am a Franzen fan but, at least in the audio version, this one was hard to follow and, therefore, it was challenging to get to know and love the characters. There are a lot of them to get to know.

The narrator did a great job. She could have helped the character development by pausing during breaks in the text. Instead, she plunged directly from one to the next, often leaving me to catch up because I hadn't realized there had been a character change.

I still gave it four stars. Franzen is amazing.

intriguing and wonderfully dark !

Please write more stories like this one, Mr.Franzen,you made me laugh at things I hadn’t considered to be funny!

Narration a bit strange at times

The narration was a bit off-putting at times. Meetu's representation of certain male characters was bizarre. She used high-pitched voices and strange verbal affectations. She seems confused about what a lisp sounds like, for example.