At only five hours long, I expected this to be a quick listen, full of interesting characters and an engaging plot. What I got instead was far from my expectations.
The story itself caught my interest easily – it has an original premise and there were some good ideas to be fleshed out. Unfortunately, the story frequently felt like that – not quite fleshed out, more like an overall layout than an actual, fully realized story. There were several noticeable places where the help of an editor could have improved the story immensely, such as smoothing out redundancies and inconsistencies.
The main character (sigh)… she was not a favorite of mine. I struggled to continue listening as she ran hot and cold, couldn’t make up her mind, and was just all over the place. Granted she just turned 18, but given her life experience and current home situation, you’d expect her to behave more maturely than she did. Pair that with her male counterpart, who couldn’t articulate a sentence to save his life, and you have a mind-numbing pathetic and annoying duo.
Last, there was the narrator… She was the worst part of the experience for me. I initially listened to the sample, and was charmed by the accent given to the characters. It also seemed in the sample that the characters were well differentiated and had unique voices. That part at least stayed the same throughout the story. Unfortunately, the narrator made the main character’s voice monotone and almost emotionless, even when she was mad and yelling. It was difficult to ignore the narrator and instead focus on the story itself.
Unfortunately, what I ended up with was a potentially good story that just really seemed like more of a rough draft rather than a fully realized work. I think with a lot of editing and fleshing out of details and and scenes, this could be quite a good listen. However, I would suggest using a different narrator to fully bring the story and characters to life.