Midst Toil and Tribulation

Safehold Series, Book 6

By: David Weber

Narrated by: Kevin T. Collins

Length: 28 hrs and 23 mins

Publisher's summary

David Weber's New York Times bestselling Safehold series of military Science Fiction adventure, which began with Off Armageddon Reef, continues with Midst Toil and Tribulation

WAR AND FAMINE

Once the Church of God Awaiting dominated all the kingdoms of Safehold. Then, after centuries of stasis, the island kingdom of Charis began to defy the edicts of Mother Church—egged on, some say, by the mysterious warrior-monk Merlin Athrawes, who enjoys the Charisian royal family's absolute trust.

What vanishingly few people know is that Merlin is the cybernetic avatar of a young woman a thousand years dead, felled in the war in which aliens destroyed Earth...and that since awakening, his task has been to restart the history of the long-hidden human race.

Now, reeling from the wars and intrigues that have cascaded from Charis's declaration of independence, the Republic of Siddermark slides into chaos. The Church has engineered a rebellion, and Siddermark's all-important harvest is at risk. King Cayleb and Queen Sharleyan struggle to stabilize their ally, which will mean sending troops—but, even more importantly, preventing famine. For mass starvation in Safehold's breadbasket is a threat even more ominous than civil war...

©2012 David Weber (P)2012 Macmillan Audio

Narrator ruins it

When you come into the middle of a series as a narrator could you please check with previous narrations to make sure you get names correct. If you've listened to the first several books it can really take you out of the story when a new narrator pronounces all the main characters names wrong. Also when you get the names of places wrong it takes you a minute as a reader to place things. I love this series but this book with the narrator was very hard to get through.

Narrator worst over actor of this or any year

Is there anything you would change about this book?

The narrator. In general this book was up to the quality I would expect from David Weber.

What didn’t you like about Kevin T. Collins’s performance?

From the very beginning every thing was done in a style I can only characterize as over acting and over dramatization. In all honesty if he narrates any further volumes in this series I highly doubt that I would select them. Also any other books that are narrated by Mr. Collins are off my list. Mispronunciation seems to be another of his failings.

If this book were a movie would you go see it?

yes

Fanatical Weber fan, but still

What did you like best about Midst Toil and Tribulation? What did you like least?

Weber's universes are so deep and rich. I love the complexity of his stories, and being immersed into that world.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Merlin.

How could the performance have been better?

Collins does great voices and clearly invests a lot in bringing out the emotions of the characters he reads, BUT he really annoyed me here. First, I understand someone jumping into the 6th book in a series can't listen to the prior 5 for the sake of consistency, but he pronounced almost NOTHING consistently with the prior 5 books. But he didn't even get the names of Nimue Alban or Charis "right," totally changing their pronunciation. Half the nations, places and characters -- all different. I was halfway through the book before I was either A) confused or B) totally annoyed or C) both. Honestly, if he'd listened for even an hour to one or two of the prior books before sitting down to record this one, he'd have avoided 90% of this. Plus, I honestly don't think I'd have made half of these mistakes even if I *hadn't* listened to the preceding works. :-( But what's even worse in my book is that he mispronounced at least a dozen common English terms. That's just not okay. If this is your job, then do your homework, man! And on top of that, he was very melodramatic, which was also a bit annoying. Sad too, because the prior 5 books were read so well.

Was Midst Toil and Tribulation worth the listening time?

Yes.

Any additional comments?

Many are complaining because Weber is taking a long time and going into a lot of detail. That's really okay with me. But I have a similar complaint... the names of both people and places in the novel are too similar and there are so many of them that it is very difficult for me to keep straight who belongs to whom, etc. I would recommend not planning to particularly this Safehold novel while you're doing other things. You've gotta pay close attention to this one.

Anyway, it's a great story and Weber is a genius. Enjoy!

*grumble* - Narration

What didn’t you like about Kevin T. Collins’s performance?

I will preface by saying that I was initially put off reading this series in print because the spelling conventions Weber uses, while clever, were so distracting they made it very difficult to get into the story. That's the main reason why I decided to try them in audio form. So, I expect a fair amount of pronunciation shift between one narrator and another. It's annoying, but I deal. Unfortunately, in this case it's combined with a breathless, over-the-top style that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the tone of the passage being read.

Poor narration, otherwise good

As others have mentioned, the narration here is a problem. The narrator performs pretty much everything, from battle scenes to tranquil scenes where nothing exciting is happening with a sort of an alarmed excitedness.

Worse than that, he pronounces some names differently from how every previous narrator in the series has pronounced them. At least, if a narrator changes in the middle of a series, the new narrator should listen to at least the previous book in the series, to make sure they stay consistent with name pronunciations. And if they haven't, surely there's an editor who listens in, and could correct mistakes such as these?

The narration didn't ruin it for me, but it was an annoyance. Glad to see the narrator changed in the next book in the series.

Great epic tale, horrible narration

Let me start by complaining about this particular book’s narrator. My best short phrase is this: “Tragically over dramatized.” At the beginning of the reading it was so bad that all I could think was, “Please, take a breath.” I almost returned the audio book to get a paper copy and read it myself. Luckily, the narration became at least endurable after the first couple of chapters.

However, don’t let this deter one from enjoying this terrific epic tale. The story itself is very well done. One easily becomes caught up in the tales of horror, of loss and trepidation, as well as the powerful victories of this war. Yet there is always the human element. Mr. Weber develops tremendous detail on all his characters, so that you learn to know them, to love or hate them, and to truly feel for their plights.

Beyond this, the world of Safehold is created so realistically that one can almost believe that it exists. David Weber’s apparent knowledge and/or research into the method of battle and technology development is superb, giving life not only to the characters in this story, but to this development of technology along with the changes in society as this development spreads. This breaths much life and realism into this Science Fictional society.

What more could one ask for in any novel?

I could say a lot about what scenes and events I liked or didn’t in this novel, but I don’t believe in spoilers. If you are interested, enjoy it yourself.

I highly recommend this tale (Along with the rest of the books in this series) as David Weber’s best series too those that I have read/listened to. Definitely worth a list or a read.

Love the Safehold Series...

If you love the safehold series you will love this one too... once you get past the narration problems. I agree with all the previous posts that SOMEONE should have done a continuity check on the pronunciations, I can live with a change of narrators... but seriously. Otherwise he did OK.

As far as the book goes, it is great, David Weber keeps the action and drama building and I can't wait for the next one. I can't beleive people are complaining about the pace of the story... I hope the series eventually gets back to the Gbaba, but the whole point of the story is the evolution of the new human history and it is exciting to listen to it happen.

Story is solid but stolid, and narrator is almost unbearable.

The story itself is broad sweeping and ambitious. The scope of detail is breathtaking and the depth of the world remarkable. This is let down in places by the author not choosing to omit details which really don't fill in our picture much at all save for simple providing the full account of battles, which gets a bit tedious at times. The characters are wonderful and it's another good book in the series.

The narrator however is absolutely horrible. His breathy, heavy, overly dramatic portrayal of everything is almost unbearable. He voices sentences that the characters clearly say in jest as if they are serious and it's just so ghastly.

Worst. Narrator. Ever.

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

How much did you save by hiring the worst narrator? The worst! Everything is breathy and dramatic and really dramatic and really really dramatic! When he does something as utterly mundane as announcing the location for the action at the beginning of a chapter, e.g. "Palace of Tellisberg, Kingdom of Charis" it's as if he's watching the Hindenberg go up in flames.

And let's not even start on how every narrator for the first 5 books (all 3 narrators) pronounce "Charis" as kar-is, but this idiot pronounces it as chair-is.

Some cynical producer said, "Hey, if they've listened to the first 5 books, they'll listen to the 6th book no matter how bad the narrator is. So let's go bottom-of-the-barrel and save the money." It is extremely disrespectful to loyal listeners.

I've only listened to about 15 minutes of the book and I'm already this disgusted. And I'm not one of those "oh no they changed the narrator I hate this" people; I'm quite willing to entertain changes in narrators during a book series.

How did the narrator detract from the book?

omg see above. I guess Kevin Collins works for cheap, because he's listed as the narrator for 188 Audible titles. I, for one, will NEVER buy another book for which he is the narrator. I've listened to perhaps 2000 audiobooks and he is the worst narrator I've ever encountered.

Getting slow...and please the narrator!

Would you be willing to try another one of Kevin T. Collins’s performances?

Probably not. While he has great vocal skills (differentiating characters well), he needs a pronunciation coach and he is way too overly dramatic. It was like 1960's Captain Kirk was reading. This guy makes every sentence DRAMATIC. "And THEN, he went INTO the .... baaathrooom!" Seriously, I'm sure not every sentence ends in an exclamation point, but Kevin Collin's makes it sound that way.I actually stopped listening 4 or 5 times just because of the narrator. It gets hard to tell what's really dramatic and important when he's ALWAYS dramatic!

Any additional comments?

This book is way too slow. I know there are a lot of characters and moving armies around the world takes a long time, but there just wasn't much action. I love David Weber for his great battle scenes - epic space naval battles from Honor Harrington series for example. I actually like how he shows the development of technologies in this series, but I have more than 2/3 through and there had only a couple skirmishes. He appears to be setting the stage for some fierce and epic battles but... get to it already!

Maybe I'll update this post when I finally get to the end.