jenise aaron

Beautifully crafted story and excellent narration

Reviewed: 2024-01-09

I honestly can find no fault here. The story was told beautifully. The prose was stirring and evoked such vivid imagery with every word. I loved the plot and the characters. Even those with little ‘screen time’ didn’t feel wasted to me. I will definitely listen to this book again. The author is a wonderful narrator as well and did his novel justice.

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Great narration and fun review interwoven with great insights

Reviewed: 2023-12-14

I mean, do I really need to encourage you to buy this? It’s Richard Ayoade. That’s really incentive enough, I think. He is as good a writer and narrator as you would imagine. View From the Top is a movie I loved as a kid. I bought this thinking it was an autobiography and finding out it was a review/recap of the movie with little anecdotes from Ayoade’s life, etc was actually a fun surprise. Just buy it!

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A great sequel, with interesting new characters joining our old faves.

Reviewed: 2023-10-24

I loved Tes and Ren. I’m still undecided about Kosika and my distaste for Nadiya is a testament to the author’s talent for writing a complex character with grey motivations.
I did find the ‘big reveals’ easy to spot from a mile away so they weren’t at all surprising, which was a tad disappointing but did not ruin the experience very much.
I hated Michael Kramer’s performance. His accents and the voices he chose for the various characters were weird and took me out of the story each time. Two of the narrators (minis Tes’ POV narrator) had a weird inflection to the end of some of the sentences, dragging them out in an irritating way that made them sound almost like a question but not quite. I didn’t understand why that narrative choice was made, and it did detract from my overall experience. I did quite enjoy Kate Reading’s and Marisa Calin’s narration (especially whoever was responsible for Tes’ chapters). I do hope Kramer is replaced for the sequels.
Definitely recommend this for people who loved the first series, and I don’t think I would consider this book accessible for anyone who has not read the original trilogy/a good entry point for the Shades of Magic universe.

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Definitely worth a listen

Reviewed: 2023-10-16

I think this book leans more to the FBI and the investigative side of things, than it does to the Indigenous people’s history and giving voice to their experiences then and now. Things like referring to residential schools as ‘boarding schools’ or leaving out the fact that a lot of Osage Head Rights belong to non-Osage descendants now and the convoluted legal barriers that prevent those rights from being returned to the Osage nation make it more about the FBI and the failures of the investigation than anything else. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I just think people should be aware of that going in.

Will Patton is an amazing narrator. Danny Campbell was great too. Ann Marie Lee I did not enjoy because no white woman should a) be saying the n-word, period; nor b) should she be saying it in a casual, almost perky tone. As a Black woman, I found it jarring and it really made me almost stop listening.

I think the story does lose something by not being told from an Indigenous perspective, but it does seem well-researched and the final section does offer a bit of insight from current tribe members and descendants which was impactful.

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3 people found this helpful