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Swamplandia!
- Narrated by: Arielle Sitrick, David Ackroyd
- Length: 13 hrs and 7 mins
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Publisher's summary
From the celebrated 29-year-old author of the everywhere-heralded short-story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (“How I wish these were my own words, instead of the breakneck demon writer Karen Russell’s...Run for your life. This girl is on fire” - Los Angeles Times Book Review) comes a blazingly original debut novel that takes us back to the swamps of the Florida Everglades, and introduces us to Ava Bigtree, an unforgettable young heroine.
The Bigtree alligator-wrestling dynasty is in decline, and Swamplandia!, their island home and gator-wrestling theme park, formerly number one in the region, is swiftly being encroached upon by a fearsome and sophisticated competitor called the World of Darkness. Ava’s mother, the park’s indomitable headliner, has just died; her sister, Ossie, has fallen in love with a spooky character known as the Dredgeman, who may or may not be an actual ghost; and her brilliant big brother, Kiwi, who dreams of becoming a scholar, has just defected to the World of Darkness in a last-ditch effort to keep their family business from going under. Ava’s father, affectionately known as Chief Bigtree, is AWOL; and that leaves Ava, a resourceful but terrified 13, to manage 98 gators and the vast, inscrutable landscape of her own grief.
Against a backdrop of hauntingly fecund plant life animated by ancient lizards and lawless hungers, Karen Russell has written an utterly singular novel about a family’s struggle to stay afloat in a world that is inexorably sinking. An arrestingly beautiful and inventive work from a vibrant new voice in fiction.
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The Bigtree clan is a family in crisis. The mother, Hiola, has passed away and she was not only the main gator wrestler and star attraction at the Swamplandia theme park, but the glue that held the family together. Now on the verge of losing their beloved home, the Bigtrees find they are ill-prepared to deal with the real world into which they've been thrust. Each member of the family leaves their sheltered enclave convinced they can somehow turn things around. Yet do they leave Swamplandia more to save it or to escape it?
The narration duties here are divided in some very interesting ways. Actress/writer Arielle Sitrick plays the main character of young Ava in the chapters focusing mainly on Swamplandia. David Ackroyd takes on the role of Kiwi, the older teenage son, with his chapters being told mainly from a rival theme park, a place that's a bizarro alternative universe version of his previous home. The two narrators see things quite differently. Sitrick voices Ava as the winsome innocent and the mystic heart of a Swamplandia where anything is possible; however, did the nostalgic world she remembers ever really exist? Ackroyd plays Kiwi as the somewhat naive yet most practical member of the family. He has big plans and learns quickly, but finds things are not quite so easy out in the real world.
Karen Russell's Swamplandia is an amusing and well crafted piece that's a bit Florida gothic and a bit magical realism. Will Ava's rare red gator save the day? Maybe Kiwi with his big plans and Forrest Gump-like luck will come through after all? Will younger sister Osceola ever marry her long-dead ghost boyfriend? Then again, perhaps the various family pipe dreams are destined to fail, as perhaps is Swamplandia? In the end the characters and the listener have to question just what a happy ending for this quirky family would even look like. That's the journey that Russell takes you on with Swamplandia, and it's a colorful, original trip well worth taking. Cleo Creech
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Sometimes a Great Notion
- By: Ken Kesey
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 30 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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A literary icon sometimes seen as a bridge between the Beat Generation and the hippies, Ken Kesey scored an unexpected hit with his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. His successful follow-up, Sometimes a Great Notion, was also transformed into a major motion picture, directed by and starring Paul Newman. Here, Oregon’s Stamper family does what it can to survive a bitter strike dividing their tiny logging community. And as tensions rise, delicate family bonds begin to fray and unravel.
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Sometimes a Great Novel Pops up out of Nowhere
- By Mr. Eyuz on 06-07-19
By: Ken Kesey
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A Death in Kitchawank, and Other Stories
- By: T. C. Boyle
- Narrated by: T. C. Boyle
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Few authors write with such sheer love of story and language as T. C. Boyle, and that is nowhere more evident than in his inventive, wickedly funny, and always entertaining short stories. Here are 14 new tales previously unpublished in book form. By turns mythic and realistic, farcical and tragic, ironic and moving, Boyle's stories have mapped a wide range of human emotions. The stories here reflect his maturing themes.
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Mixed Bag
- By AuntGert on 09-22-20
By: T. C. Boyle
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Make Something Up
- Stories You Can't Unread
- By: Chuck Palahniuk
- Narrated by: Chuck Palahniuk, Scott Sowers, Rich Orlow, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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For years Chuck Palahniuk has reserved his best storytelling for his readings, often choosing to read a new short story instead of whatever novel he is supposed to be promoting. Make Something Up compiles these previously unpublished tales for the very first time, plus the Byliner social media insta-classic "Phoenix" and Palahniuk's most notable pieces from Playboy.
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Plenty of shock, just not enough Palahniuk awe
- By Darwin8u on 06-10-15
By: Chuck Palahniuk
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The Best Horror of the Year, Volume 4
- By: Ellen Datlow - author/editor, Stephen King, Peter Straub
- Narrated by: Meredith Mitchell, Rebecca Mitchell, Michael Healy, and others
- Length: 16 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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With tales from Laird Barron, Stephen King, John Langan, Peter Straub, and many others, and featuring Datlow’s comprehensive overview of the year in horror, now, more than ever, The Best Horror of the Year provides the petrifying horror fiction readers have come to expect - and enjoy.
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Only a few decent stories in this bunch.
- By Jerry on 12-06-14
By: Ellen Datlow - author/editor, and others
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Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance
- A Novel
- By: Ruth Emmie Lang
- Narrated by: Piper Goodeve, Peter Berkrot, Cassandra Campbell, and others
- Length: 10 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Stopping a tornado was the first of many strange events that seem to follow Weylyn from town to town, although he doesn't like to take credit. As amazing as these powers may appear, they tend to manifest themselves at inopportune times and places. From freak storms to trees that appear to grow over night, Weylyn's unique abilities are a curiosity at best and at worst, a danger to himself and the woman he loves. But Mary doesn't care.
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An Accidental Wonder!
- By Brandy Pendergrass on 02-16-18
By: Ruth Emmie Lang
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Arcadia
- By: Lauren Groff
- Narrated by: Andrew Garman
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Lauren Groff’s acclaimed debut novel The Monsters of Templeton was short-listed for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, Arcadia opens in the late 1960s with a group of young idealists forming a commune in western New York State. Into this group is born Bit, who grows into a quiet, distant man. Over the course of 50 years, Bit witnesses the utopia crumble and the world change in unimaginable ways.
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Luscious prose, intimate and realistic
- By Kathleen on 03-22-12
By: Lauren Groff
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The Mosquito Coast
- By: Paul Theroux
- Narrated by: David Aaron Baker
- Length: 16 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Allie Fox is going to re-create the world. Abominating the cops, crooks, junkies and scavengers of modern America, he abandons civilisation and takes the family to live in the Honduran jungle. There his tortured messianic genius keeps them alive, his hoarse tirades harrying them through a diseased and dirty Eden towards unimaginable darkness.
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Dreadful in every sense of the word.
- By Joan on 07-12-15
By: Paul Theroux
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The Necromancer's House
- By: Christopher Buehlman
- Narrated by: Todd Haberkorn
- Length: 11 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Andrew Ranulf Blankenship is a handsome, stylish nonconformist with wry wit, a classic Mustang, and a massive library. He is also a recovering alcoholic and a practicing warlock, able to speak with the dead through film. His house is a maze of sorcerous booby traps and escape tunnels, as yours might be if you were sitting on a treasury of Russian magic stolen from the Soviet Union thirty years ago.
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Finally - Magic / Fantasy Novel for adults.
- By David on 04-23-14
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Mannheim Rex
- By: Robert Pobi
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 14 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Recently widowered and grieving, Gavin flees New York City for the quiet of the country. His new home on Lake Caldasac has surprisingly few visitors, and the author soon learns why: a suspiciously high number of people have gone missing in the small town. The deaths have all been ruled accidents, but Finn Horn, a handicapped boy obsessed with fishing, knows the truth. There’s a monster in the lake. And it wants to feed.
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Interesting and fun
- By Bob on 01-14-13
By: Robert Pobi
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The New Moon's Arms
- By: Nalo Hopkinson
- Narrated by: Gin Hammond
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Calamity is confronting two big transitions: the death of her beloved father and the beginning of menopause, a physical shift that has rekindled her gift for finding lost things. Suddenly, she is getting hot flashes that seem to forge objects out of thin air, most notably a four-year old boy. As Calamity takes the child into her care, she discovers that all is not as it seems. Then, Calamity must reawaken to the mysteries surrounding her own childhood and the early disappearance of her mother.
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What a joy
- By newmoon on 07-05-19
By: Nalo Hopkinson
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Sister Mine
- By: Nalo Hopkinson
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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"We'd had to be cut free of our mother's womb. Abby and I were fused, you see. But here's the real kicker; Abby had the magic, I didn't." Now adults, Makeda and Abby still share their childhood home. The surgery to separate the two girls left Makeda with what feels like an even worse deformity: no mojo. The daughters of a celestial demigod and a human woman, Makeda and Abby were raised by their magical father. Today, Makeda has decided it's high time to move out and make her own life.
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Narrator saves this story
- By Denis A. on 03-21-14
By: Nalo Hopkinson
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Battleborn
- By: Claire Vaye Watkins
- Narrated by: Ali Ahn, Morgan Hallett, Laura Knight Keating, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Annie Proulx, Battleborn represents a near-perfect confluence of sensibility and setting, and the introduction of an exceptionally powerful and original literary voice. In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it.
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Wonderful magnificent stories beautifully told
- By Pedro Ramirez on 12-03-15
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Other Voices, Other Rooms
- By: Truman Capote
- Narrated by: Cody Roberts
- Length: 6 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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At the age of 12, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at the decaying mansion in Skully's Landing, his father is nowhere in sight. What he finds instead is a sullen stepmother who delights in killing birds; an uncle with the face - and heart - of a debauched child; and a fearsome little girl named Idabel who may offer him the closest thing he has ever known to love.
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Capote’s coming of age story
- By Daniel Diffin on 11-08-23
By: Truman Capote
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Hour of the Bees
- By: Lindsay Eagar
- Narrated by: Almarie Guerra
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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While her friends are spending their summers having pool parties and sleepovers, twelve-year-old Carolina - Carol - is spending hers in the middle of the New Mexico desert, helping her parents move the grandfather she's never met into a home for people with dementia. At first, Carol avoids prickly Grandpa Serge.
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Love it!
- By Lucy Manetti on 04-10-17
By: Lindsay Eagar
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Beauty Queens
- By: Libba Bray
- Narrated by: Libba Bray
- Length: 14 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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The 50 contestants in the Miss Teen Dream pageant thought this was going to be a fun trip to the beach, where they could parade in their state-appropriate costumes and compete in front of the cameras. But sadly, their airplane had another idea, crashing on a desert island and leaving the survivors stranded with little food, little water, and practically no eyeliner. What’s a beauty queen to do? Continue to practice for the talent portion of the program - or wrestle snakes to the ground? Get a perfect tan - or learn to run wild? And what should happen when the sexy pirates show up?
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No one left unscathed
- By Vanessa on 09-12-11
By: Libba Bray
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I believe this book is best listened to than read
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Something strange is happening at the Orsk furniture superstore in Cleveland. Every morning, employees arrive to find broken Kjerring wardrobes, shattered Brooka glassware, and vandalized Liripip sofa beds—clearly someone, or something, is up to no good. To unravel the mystery, five young employees volunteer for a long dusk-till-dawn shift and encounter horrors that defy imagination.
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Library at Mount Char
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Carolyn's not so different from the other human beings around her. After all, she was a normal American herself once. That was a long time ago, of course - before the time she calls "adoption day", when she and a dozen other children found themselves being raised by a man they learned to call Father.
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Not Your Local Library
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Never Let Me Go
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Be patient; it will pay off
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
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It's 1939, in New York City. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdiniesque escape, has just pulled off his greatest feat: smuggling himself out of Hitler's Prague. He's looking to make big money, fast, so that he can bring his family to freedom. His cousin, Brooklyn's own Sammy Clay, is looking for a partner in creating the heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit the American dreamscape: the comic book. Inspired by their own fantasies, fears, and dreams, they create the Escapist.
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A World I DON'T Ever Want to Escape From.
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By: Michael Chabon
What listeners say about Swamplandia!
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Josh
- 03-05-23
Great book!
While I’ll agree that it was a bit lacking by the end, I lived this book. The characters were deep and funny and I rooted for every move they made. Highly suggest this one to people.
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- Sarah DeFeo
- 11-17-12
Beautifully written tale about family
I thought this was a magical, beautifully written book-- I found it engrossing. Karen Russell is clearly extraordinarily talented.
Regarding the narrator: At first I was also put off by her voice and tone, but I quickly got over it. For me, the narration definitely did not ruin the book. As most of the book is written in the voice of a 14 year old girl, the narrator was probably an appropriate choice, even though I didn't love her performance.
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- Maggie
- 09-14-12
Awesome writer, garbled female narrator
Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?
Every once in a while, I listen to a great book that I have to stop listening to and buy the written version. This is such an audible book. I am enthralled by the writing of this book and the story (the unique setting and characters) but I miss so much of the narration that I have to continuously rewind to catch what the narrator is saying and sometimes, even after two tries, I still cannot get it. The narrator sounds like the character she is speaking but her diction is so imprecise that it has spoiled the audible book for me. After listening to well over 100 Audible books, this is the only the second time this has happened.
Could you see Swamplandia! being made into a movie or a TV series? Who should the stars be?
Given the banality of what Hollywood puts out, this book would be a welcome film.
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- eve
- 11-25-16
Loathed the main performer
What a jarring experience. I would have returned this audiobook after less than 5 minutes of listening if it hadn't been the selection for our book club.
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- Elizabeth Mcalister
- 05-01-12
Amazing, powerful, haunting, and funny
What did you love best about Swamplandia!?
The wonderful, screwy fabulous Bigtree family.Before circumstances send them spinning out of control, I wanted to be one of them, wrestling alligators, and running wild in the Florida everglades.
Who was your favorite character and why?
Ava Bigtree of course. Precocious, funny, brave, the loss of her mother leaves her untethered and vulnerable to evil.
What does Arielle Sitrick and David Ackroyd bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
The narrators vividly capture the voices of Karen Russell's wonderful characters
If you were to make a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?
Unforgetable
Any additional comments?
This is a wonderful, wonderful book, one of my favorites of all time. Everyone should read it. That said, I thought that Russell didn't know how to end it. I found the last bit of the book weaker than the start, but it is still an a fabulously imagined world with characters that jump off the page, voices that will stay with you for the rest of your life. How can a book be side splittingly funny, and heartbreakingly tragic.
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- DJEPRR
- 11-24-13
Reader was distracting
Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?
I would be hesitant to recommend this mostly because of the performance.
If you’ve listened to books by Karen Russell before, how does this one compare?
This was my first book performed by Karen Russell.
How did the narrator detract from the book?
I was repeatedly off put by the reader's mispronunciation of words. This kept me from being able to fully involve myself in the story. Shouldn't someone have noticed this during production?!
If this book were a movie would you go see it?
I don't think so.
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- Clever Nickname
- 03-02-11
Murky and Slow Moving
Originating from a 2006 short story found in St.Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, Swaplandia! is Karen Russell’s debut novel and will probably be remembered for its sheer oddity and Russell’s poetic and unconventional use of language. You have quotes like, "Something lunged in me then. receded. A giggle or a sob. A noise. I thought you look very stupid dad" and "Like any hatchling gator, her snout tapered into a look of flutey suspicion". Such lush descriptions and grammatical acrobatics due demand attention (as does the exclamation point in the title), but they do little to help our plucky narrator Ava who has been abandoned by her entire family at their alligator wrestling park in the Florida swamplands. At its best pace Swamplandia! ebbs along. A secondary sub plot involving Ava’s brother Kiwi who runs away to work at a rival amusement park, goes nowhere. When the action begins, somewhere in the middle of the story—Ava sets out to save her older sister who has run away to marry her ghost lover--it’s a welcome relief which then gives way to terror as we realize the dangerous situation Ava has naively put herself in.
In case you’re unaware, Swamplandia! received a starred review from Booklist, Library Journal, and Publisher’s weekly, an A- from EW, a rave in ELLE, a plug from Stephen King amongst other glowing accounts. These accolades frankly left me stumped. I had to start the story over almost a dozen times because I kept losing interest. Yes, it is imaginative and uniquely voiced, but instead of coloring Ava’s story, these devices bog it down.
The audio book is read by a young narrator, Arielle Sitrick, and since Ava is a pre-teen, this makes sense. But the alternating chapters are voiced by David Ackroyd who is clearly a middle age man, not the tonnage Kiwi one expects. So it makes the gimmick of using Arielle pointless. Disappointed.
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- Anonymous User
- 01-19-20
Fusion fantasy fun
I knew what I WAS GETTING INTO with Karen Russell, and she delivers with good frolic and a gift for language. Downside for me was the female reader Ms Sitrick, who’s high chirpy voice (with little feel for the sentences flows and rhythms) was a serious negative to the point where I almost stopped listening. REALLY irritating, and a huge disservice to the story’s cadence and linguistic tone.
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- Ryan S. Balgos
- 05-06-19
Great performance for an okay book
I only listened to this for class. The performers made it bearable. I personally didn't enjoy the book's contents.
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- Elizabeth
- 03-12-13
Narrators came up short on intriguing FL novel
The audio editors should have corrected the pronunciation of countless words - ibis, conch, Pahokee . . . misspoken by both narrators. Usually, repeatedly, although for some the pronunciation was corrected later in the audio book. The editor should have called a Floridian and learned the words. That was quite irresponsible.
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