While Soundbooth theater is well known and fairly trusted, I am amazed that they hired Justin Thomas James and have not fired him for incompetence – or, at the very least, given him notes on his performances and asked him to rerecord those that are awful. This is probably the simplest narration he could do as there are only two characters for most of the novel and one of them is played by Annie Elcott. This guy plays everything at a 7 out of 10 or above. This means that normal narration that should be down at a 4 or a 5 is exhausting to listen to as he treats everything like an exciting story moment and I found myself having to speed him up to 150-160% of the normal narration speed just to keep myself focused on the story. Additionally, he has zero low-lights in his performance. The main character is grumbling about minor complaints and this narrator chooses to dial up the performance to a 10 so that it plays like the character is going crazy when he’s just complaining and that gives his performance nowhere to go when the character actually does struggle with sanity.

As for the novel, there’s a reason that scientist characters in novels have a non-scientist around. The reason is that this forces the scientists to keep their inner thoughts about how cool the science behind things are internal and to only explain them to the other non-scientist character when they’re important to the story. I’m a fan of science and science fiction, so I got this stuff, but was still bored by a lot of it because it was just a nerdy author indulging in his love of science. These bits weren’t important to the narrative and half the audience won’t understand what he’s talking about anyway so he just created an off-ramp for half the listener’s attention.

I purchased this based on another reader saying it was his favorite novel in this genre, so there must be some customers for this, but even if the audience is narrow, a book should be loved and cherished. It shouldn’t be self-indulgent with scientific jargon and it shouldn’t be given to the narrator who is the owner’s nephew (or whatever the hell is happening over at Soundbooth such that they’re letting this guy work as a narrator **and** not making him rerecord work when he does this badly). Obviously, I’m going to avoid Justin Thomas James work from now on, but I also feel I have to be wary about Soundbooth Theater now as they’ve made it clear they aren’t checking the quality of work before putting it out in the world.