Miss Midshipman Teasdale

By: Gorg Huff, Paula Goodlett

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

A WarSpell novel, in a world where war ships are just starting to make the change from ballistas to cannon that use a magically created gunpowder.

Tensy Teasdale is forced by financial hardship to give up her studies of magic and join the Kingdom Navy as a midshipman. It's a hard life for her. While women have been serving in the Navy for decades, not everyone accepts them. It's even harder if you're a studious introvert who incurs the ire of a brute of a senior Midshipman who's just failed his Lieutenant’s test again.

And that's just the first of Miss Midshipman Teasdale's misadventures. After that, she has to deal with a Merged mugger who's learning how to deal with this world, an elven carpenter who's considered worse than a necromancer because he works with the dead bodies of trees—not to mention the shell and shot of battle on the high seas.

And if she survives all that, there's the politics of the Admiralty Court to deal with…

Hornblower meets Martin Padway in a WarSpell gameworld.

Miss Midshipman Tensy Teasdale is a new middy in the kingdom navy. She, like Horatio, doesn't start out well and things go downhill from there.
Pete the Cudgel Banyan is a thief and a bully with little thought beyond his next beer, next lay, or how unfair it was that he wasn't born the son of a lord. As a pressed man, his lot may be even worse than Tensy's, because the first officer is a sadist who wants everyone broken to the navy. And Pete's the sort to die in the breaking.
Pete's rebelion offers Tensy a chance to—if not win—at least take her tormentors down with her.
Tensy makes her play at Pete's Captain's Mast and Pete determines to take his lashes like a man.
Enter Peter Bradley, a mechanical engineer who played Pete Banyon years ago in a game of WarSpell. As the 21st lash falls, Pete's heart stutters and would have failed, but Peter Merged with him. Leaving Peter Banyan hail and healthy to take the last three blows of the cat.

Actually impressed with the Virtual Voice.

Interesting story, the kind I’ve come to expect from the authors. I had avoided AI narration before, but I have heard humans who did a worse job.

Most Mixed Review Ever

Ok, first of all, if I had paid for a book with 'Virtual Voice' I'd be ticked. But since it was part of the plus catalogue...here's what I can say about it. It's a big step up from the text-to-speech built into most e readers, but that doesn't make it good. The voice is more pleasant and rounded, the speech patterns improved and fewer issues with homophones and abbreviations. But it's lifeless, has weird pauses, and eventually becomes fatiguing to listen to.

The story started well, but nothing in what I read in the synopsis prepared me for it becoming a game-based fantasy world. I kept with it after that reveal for a while, but the story didn't really go anywhere. Between that and the tedious voice I ended up stopping about halfway in. Kind of a bummer, I was very interested for a while, but the story just stalled and without a good narrator to carry me over the lows, just proved not worth my time.