First, let me say that Jeff Hayes gave his usual impeccable performance. He is the anchor (talent-wise) that holds SBT together. They have some other decent narrators, but when I listen to SBT audiobooks that don’t include Hayes in the cast I regularly find myself wishing that he were the one narrating.
On to the book itself. The story that Sara King presents is full of depth and (if you make it to the end) presents a plotline with huge amounts of promise for future books. I really enjoyed her imagination and universe building. The writing mechanics were also very good. I really enjoyed following her characters through their adventure.
The thing that created the ambivalence was that she used some pretty cheap tricks to create emotional turmoil and her characters’ statements and actions often play as 2 dimensional caricatures of heartless people. They come off as unrealistic not because I don’t believe that there are people out there who are that stupid, nasty, or uncaring, but because she does a totally inadequate job of making them seem like actual people as opposed to props that she uses to create drama.
I regularly found myself infuriated by the flippant and, to be blunt, lazy way she used these ridiculous side characters to create whatever emotions and hangups she wanted her main cast to be manipulated by. In turn, this ended up making the real suffering and indecision of her major characters seem like hysterical hand-wringing instead of genuine turmoil. There were also some pretty tacky Y.A. parts that had me questioning whether it was worth it to continue listening.
So with all that said, I gave this book 4 stars only because of the last hour or so of the book… No spoilers here so I won’t give any detail. Suffice to say that after the whole tale seemed to be wrapped up King managed to broaden the story from just following an adolescent boy through a harrowing series of events into something with greater depth. By doing this she managed to create a jumping off point for a series of a much larger scale and with the potential to spin off interesting stories for a long time to come.
To sum it up, while I was very invested in the plot, I also almost stopped listening multiple times because it was impossible to suspend my disbelief when the author would just throw out some B.S. to add drama or create conflict.
I might recommend this book to certain people who are willing to slog a bit to get through an interesting story, but I don’t think I could give a blanket recommendation to everyone who likes this genre.
As for me, I’m hoping that Sara King makes some improvements to her craft in the next book, otherwise I doubt I will be willing to give the third book a shot.