Well, that was ... something

First off: the narration:
Pretty bad. I have never heard any audiobook with a production quality like this. Every character is spoken by a different voice, and while a few of them do a decent job, most of the speakers are just terrible, on occasion even unintentionally funny. The narrator has an annoying monotone and sometimes seems to barely know what to make of a sentence. Especially in the first book, most of the female voices are too similar and you hardly know who's speaking. Especially since all the "he said"/"she said" parts have been stripped from the script, and I feel like there might bave been a bit of actual narrative content lost during that shortening process. On occasion there's audible difference in the recording quality from different actors. There's the same music playing at the start/end of every chapter, and it oftentimes does not at all match the mood of the story at that moment, a very odd sensation.

If that doesn't put you off and you feel like the story of an audio book is much more important than the presentation anyway, here's my bit on

The books:
Well, I'm happy I've met Emily and Lord Walderhurst, since this is a bit of an unconventional love story (If you want to call it that, it's more of a "I think I'm fond of you" story until the end of the second book.) I especially like how Emily is not at all your typical romance heroine, and I'm happy to know she's allowed to have her happy end.
On the other hand, both of them really are VERY uncomplicated characters, and there's not a whole lot of development going on with them. Especially Emily is an extremely passive protagonist, the stories are absolutely happening around her and she just reacts.
While the first book is a short, sweet feel-good book, the second one is longer and much, much darker. There's sickness, ruthless people, murder plots and actual death, and sweet Emily sits right in the middle of it and doesn't know what to think. It's an interesting book on that account, but it doesn't know what it wants to be. A character study? A mystery? A psychological thriller? A melodrama? It decides to be one after the other.

So now I've had a bit of an emotional rollercoaster and don't know exactly what to think about this audio book. But it certainly wasn't dull, that's for sure.

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