I never thought I’d find a book narrated by Joel Leslie unlistenable but I couldn’t finish this one in audio. The accent for the Korean grandmother sounded like a racist parody. Upon checking the book’s text it seems it was in the performance choices. He stutters and pauses and uses a cartoonishly bad accent even though it isn’t written that way. I’m surprised he wasn’t told to redo her parts of the book. The German accents also sound off to me (kind of like The Count from Sesame street) but not as dramatically as the Korean accent. Also he chose to do a posh British accent for the non-dialogue parts of the book even though nobody is British so I just found that a somewhat strange choice.
As far as the story goes, I think it was decent but my opinion has definitely been colored by the strange narration choices. It feels like the book is a bit longer than it needs to be and I didn’t feel like there was much development with the two main characters even though they didn’t even kiss for a long time. They seemed to have chemistry at first but then it got dragged out and they didn’t make any progress besides continuing to think the other one was good looking. I guess I just wanted more from the romance. I’m still planning to pick up the second book on kindle to see if I like it better but I definitely won’t be continuing with audio.
Review from Origin →