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A review by bookworm_brad
Elsewhere by Dean Koontz
3.0
I love the theme of this book and thought it would be just my kind of thing: Dimension travel to parallel worlds. The first Dean Koontz book I ever read, many years ago, was Lightning, a tale about Time Travel and that got me hooked on Dean's works so I figured a book about Dimension Travel might hold the same kind of magic. Sadly it didn't live up to my expectations.
Now, that's not to say it's a bad book, it's certainly not, but neither is it one of the author's best books. There was so much potential, so much promised and so many missed opportunities to make this an awesome story. Of course, maybe there's a sequel in mind, something to explore some of the many other worlds that are mentioned and of course to put them all into one book would have made it a huge tome, probably far too long for the readers to keep interested.
The book is well written moves along at a good pace. I do miss the banter and clever dialogue that I so used to love in Dean's earlier books though as none of this is present here. Still, it is entertaining and well worth a read.
I listened to the audiobook version of this and that actually cost at least a half star off my rating. While the male narrator, Edoardo Ballerini, does a reasonable job, the female narrator, Amani Parks, not only reads painfully slowly but throughout the book she leaves weird pauses in mid sentence again and again, almost as though she's turning a page and pausing while she does so, except it's more frequently than a full page worth of narration. Very annoying. For me it ruined the immersion, in that I kept thinking "why did she leave a pause there" rather than getting inside the story.
I also couldn't make out the name of the daughter when she said it which may just be due to the accent but to me it always sounded more like Amenee or Emenee than Amity. I actually had to look it up on the book page to find out what the name was though Edoardo does pronounce it much better.
Now, that's not to say it's a bad book, it's certainly not, but neither is it one of the author's best books. There was so much potential, so much promised and so many missed opportunities to make this an awesome story. Of course, maybe there's a sequel in mind, something to explore some of the many other worlds that are mentioned and of course to put them all into one book would have made it a huge tome, probably far too long for the readers to keep interested.
The book is well written moves along at a good pace. I do miss the banter and clever dialogue that I so used to love in Dean's earlier books though as none of this is present here. Still, it is entertaining and well worth a read.
I listened to the audiobook version of this and that actually cost at least a half star off my rating. While the male narrator, Edoardo Ballerini, does a reasonable job, the female narrator, Amani Parks, not only reads painfully slowly but throughout the book she leaves weird pauses in mid sentence again and again, almost as though she's turning a page and pausing while she does so, except it's more frequently than a full page worth of narration. Very annoying. For me it ruined the immersion, in that I kept thinking "why did she leave a pause there" rather than getting inside the story.
I also couldn't make out the name of the daughter when she said it which may just be due to the accent but to me it always sounded more like Amenee or Emenee than Amity. I actually had to look it up on the book page to find out what the name was though Edoardo does pronounce it much better.