It gets better….in completely different series..

So the good news; Annette Marie is a great author. The bad news; this book is not a good example of her skills. I was relieved to find out that this book was published prior to both the Red Winter Trilogy as well as The Guild Codex series. Once I realized that the Steel and Stone Series were earlier works I was happy I read the other two series prior to the Steel and Stone otherwise I may have been hesitant to even read the other two series in the first place.

This first book in the Steel and Stone series is very juvenile and predictable. Piper is cringe-worthy naive and aggravatingly unintelligent. While she is young, around 18, she acts like a very sheltered 14 year old with daddy and mommy issues. It’s believable that circumstance made her that way to a degree, but I have a hard time believing her character as many teenagers are not as silly and gullible as she is. Another aspect that this book lacks that is much improved in her other series is the world building. The other two series do a great job of giving the reader a real feel for the world they are stepping into and they do it well enough in the beginning to give context to the rest of the prose. This first book of Steel and Stone was a bit hodge-podge on giving the reader world context. Maybe this was intentional, but if it was, it wasn’t done well. There is soo much potential with this world and the types of magic and creatures, it was just a lot of running from one ‘oh crap’ situation to the next. The characters are going end up with early deaths from too much cortisol.

The narrator……there were times when Jorjeana Marie had a great, layered, and dynamic approach to voicing the characters. Then there was the nasal, annoying, and grating voice used frequently when she voiced Piper’s dialogue. I almost rage-quit because it was hard to stick through the sections of pure nasally inflection. Jorjeana has a wonderful voice, but the main character choice of voice style really needs some work.

Audio quality; what’s up with the weird deep rumble in the background….Several times throughout the recording I heard what sounded like thunder/dump truck driving by. I paused many times to see if it was something in my world causing the noise, but it was definitively the audio-recording. Either there was background noise during the recording or the narrator was brushing up on the mic.