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A review by shoegazesecondhand_books
The Poison Paradox by Hadley Field, Felix Green
adventurous
hopeful
lighthearted
mysterious
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
3.0
While I'm don't regularly read cozy fantasy stories, I thought this might be the gentle break I need between larger, heavy books. I do think this book has promise, and although not *entirely* cozy (there are some pretty dark themes in here, albeit treated with gentle hands), I think reading a physical or e-copy would have made it better.
The audiobook narration, however, has some sound issues:
There's some quiet buzzing in the background that you only really notice in between chapters when it goes quiet.
My main issue is: *why* would you have only one narrator for a dual POV story, told in 1st person, that follows two men?
Thomas Busby is doing his best out here and has some lovely vocal qualities, but besides the (overly silly and sometimes hard to understand) voices he does for side characters, it's incredibly difficult to follow whose POV he's reading. A story told in 3rd person would have worked better for an MM romance like this. It didn't help that his voice while narrating Eamon's inside thoughts sounded nothing like his speaking voice (but it did sound like Prince Alaric's). We also dropped so many of the dialog/speech tags, which convoluted these scenes further.
All that to be said, I think this is a cute story for readers of the genre, but is best "eyeball-read" in lieu of the audio version.
Big thanks to NetGalley, Hadley Field, and the publisher for providing me with this audiobook ARC (so excited to be able to listen to more audiobooks from NG).
The audiobook narration, however, has some sound issues:
There's some quiet buzzing in the background that you only really notice in between chapters when it goes quiet.
My main issue is: *why* would you have only one narrator for a dual POV story, told in 1st person, that follows two men?
Thomas Busby is doing his best out here and has some lovely vocal qualities, but besides the (overly silly and sometimes hard to understand) voices he does for side characters, it's incredibly difficult to follow whose POV he's reading. A story told in 3rd person would have worked better for an MM romance like this. It didn't help that his voice while narrating Eamon's inside thoughts sounded nothing like his speaking voice (but it did sound like Prince Alaric's). We also dropped so many of the dialog/speech tags, which convoluted these scenes further.
All that to be said, I think this is a cute story for readers of the genre, but is best "eyeball-read" in lieu of the audio version.
Big thanks to NetGalley, Hadley Field, and the publisher for providing me with this audiobook ARC (so excited to be able to listen to more audiobooks from NG).