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A review by sage01
Runemarks by Joanne Harris
2.0
The only copy of this I could find is the audiobook, and the narrator has the single most annoying voice I've heard in ages. It might be fine for a different kind of novel, but the lisp and the nasal fingernails-on-a-chalkboard vocal tone are serving the story BADLY.
edit: The world building was really great, and it was a cool riff on Norse gods and an interesting sort of dungeon crawl of a novel. But there were way too many minor characters I couldn't tell apart, and keeping track of the various factions who mostly wanted the same thing was impossible.
I'm still completely annoyed at the narrator for not distinguishing enough between voices and for making several of the voices overly childish. I'm still baffled by why various characters were given American, English, and Irish accents...with the young protagonist sounding American and most of the villains sounding English. Never mind that members of the same family were given wildly different accents. I ended up speeding up the player to minimize the lisp...but the reading distracted enormously from the book itself.
By contrast, a good audiobook reading can improve a book, as was the case with the first Skulduggery Pleasant novel. It's a good kids' novel, but the reading (except for the stupid musical interludes, gah) was awesome.
edit: The world building was really great, and it was a cool riff on Norse gods and an interesting sort of dungeon crawl of a novel. But there were way too many minor characters I couldn't tell apart, and keeping track of the various factions who mostly wanted the same thing was impossible.
I'm still completely annoyed at the narrator for not distinguishing enough between voices and for making several of the voices overly childish. I'm still baffled by why various characters were given American, English, and Irish accents...with the young protagonist sounding American and most of the villains sounding English. Never mind that members of the same family were given wildly different accents. I ended up speeding up the player to minimize the lisp...but the reading distracted enormously from the book itself.
By contrast, a good audiobook reading can improve a book, as was the case with the first Skulduggery Pleasant novel. It's a good kids' novel, but the reading (except for the stupid musical interludes, gah) was awesome.