I think I was confused more often than not while listening to this audio book.

Sounded like a good story that I really felt drawn to but was often too confused to follow along.

This may have been due to a reasonably common issue I have had with the audio book world.

This audio book is a another example of the difference between reading a book, even a kindle book, and listening to that same book when narrated.

When reading a book, there are visual clues as to how we read and interpret the text. Common things like periods, sentence structure, and paragraphs will change how a subject is communicated.

When listening to an audio book, we depend on the narrator to provide us those clues as we listen to the story. Any decent narrator is reasonably proficient with these devices. This is not my issue and I don’t believe that my issue is truly the narrators fault. Or the authors fault either.

In many stories there are chapter breaks. Some stories have time breaks within chapters and some stories even have complete subject/context changes inside of a chapter. An example would be that a chapter starts out following one person while that person is doing something. A time break means that we are still following the same character, but, that character is now somewhere else doing something else. A noticeable amount of time has passed. On the written page there is often a large break in the text to show this time jump. Later on in the chapter, we may switch to a different character. This is similar to a time jump but also includes a character change as part of the jump. It is also signaled in a similar way on the written page.

The problem that I am having, and happens often in this book, is that there is no cue to the listener that such an event has occurred. When listening to a story, the only clues to even a paragraph change is is the subject of the paragraph and you have to listen for that . But a paragraph change really does not matter when listening unless a major change has occurred. Like a time jump. Two characters in the middle of a conversation… one falls silent… the other, after a pause, asks whats the matter? This is common with narrators. A simple pause in speaking deals with this pause in the dialog. But what if the next words in the conversation are weeks later? The same two people are speaking. The same questions are being asked. A similar conversation is taking place. But the time has jumped. When listening to the narration there is no difference between this time jump pause and the simple pause in the dialog of the prior conversation. Until the story literally tells us that time has passed we have no idea and this can often cause issues tracking with the story. I often hear no pause at all for chapter breaks, time jumps, character changes, or anything else you can imagine that is commonly shown on the written page that does not translate to the narrated page.

Some stories actually state the chapter breaks. I like this practice because when I hear this I can start looking for what has changed for the new chapter. I understand that it can be jolting in some stories but it is a needed tool for the listener to follow the story as the reader would.

I am thinking we need some tool for these other breaks as well.

I simply must say that there is a problem when the listener can not tell the difference between a period and a time jump let alone a character change or even a chapter break.

I must say that I thought the narrator did a good job with this story. I don’t think a different narrator would have read this any differently. Although, if a narrator was aware of these issues they could likely create some ways to make the listener aware of such changes as mentioned above.

I was given this free review copy audio book at my request and have voluntarily left this review.