Neil

Fantastic…

Reviewed: 24-10-23

I’m a huge fan of the Alien franchise and I thoroughly enjoyed River of Pain. It’s a great in-fill between Alien and Aliens, and although fans already know the fate of the colonists, it was great to hear their story, especially Newt’s back story.

The actors were great, and really brought their characters to life. You can feel the tension building through the story.

Having the scenes from Aliens included; the Ripley and Burke scenes, Ripley’s hearing with the Weyland Yutani execs and meeting Lt. Gorman was great and linked it so well to Aliens.

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Good content but gave up due to AWFUL narration…

Reviewed: 30-06-22

The content of the book is great and an extremely interesting subject, and a must for anyone with an interest in the division, the Normandy campaign or WW2 in general. However, I’d recommend buying the book and reading it yourself, due to the awful narration. The narrator didn’t even sound human, even less human than a SatNav!!! The same monotonous, dull tone throughout which at times made me lose concentration and my mind would wander elsewhere. I made it, in terms of the Normandy campaign to 11 June before finally giving up. This needs to be recorded by another narrator as the current narration is really really bad.

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Gave up after 10 minutes !!!

Reviewed: 06-02-20

This has the promise of being a great account of a British paratrooper during the Second World War. Sadly the author appears to have little understanding of the British Airborne forces during the War.

The story is about a member of the 6th Airborne Division and at one point, when talking about the D-Day landings the author mentions 5 Para. 5 Para was the abbreviation of the 5th Parachute Battalion who were not part of 6th Airborne Division and did not take part in the D-Day landings. The 5th Parachute Brigade, however, was a part of 6th Airborne and did take part in D-Day and I assume the author means them whem stating 5 Para.

The author, when referencing D Company, 2nd Battalion Oxf & Bucks Light Infantry (who were part of the 6th Airlanding Brigade) states that after they had captured their bridges they were to wait to be relieved by the “more experienced members of the 6th Airborne Division”. There are two things wrong with this statement:

1) 2nd Battalion Oxf & Bucks LI WERE part of 6th Airborne Division (the authors wording implies they are not)
2) the 6th Airborne Division could hardly be described as more experienced, as D-Day was the first time the 6th Airborne Division had been in action.

Shortly after this the author refers to the 6th Airborne Division as the 6th Airborne Parachute Division which is complete nonsense, as a large portion of the Division were not paratroops but glider-borne troops, meaning they went into action by landing in gliders as opposed to landing by parachute.

The author then goes onto to say that Churchill ordered the formation of the British Airborne forces because be was impressed with British Commando raids that had already been carried out...again, this is incorrect. Churchill ordered the formation of the Airborne because he was so impressed by the German Airborne units that had been used so effectively in Norway, Belgium and Holland.

When talking about the formation of the first British Airborne forces, the author describes them as the 1st British Airborne Parachute Brigade Division !!!! A Brigade is not the same thing as a Division and anyone with the slightest understanding of military order of battles will know that.

Sadly, all of the above was mentioned in the first ten minutes of the book and put me off listening to the rest. For anyone with an understanding or interest in the British Airborne forces during the War, I would advise steering clear of this book. I’m not sure whether the author had his draft copy of this book read by anyone who understands the Airborne forces, but he should have had his copy approved. Very disappointing book.

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1 person found this helpful

Great story...AWFUL NARRATION !!!

Reviewed: 22-01-20

Night of the Fox is one of my favourite Jack Higgins books. It contains everything you could want in a WW2 action/espionage thriller and I recommend this story for anyone with a love of WW2 novels.

Sadly though, I would recommend people to either buy a copy of the book and read it themselves or find the audio CD narrated by Michael Page, rather than listen to the awful narrartion by Andy Cresswell. Cresswell's accents are nowhere close to what they should be, the only accent he is able to perform convincingly is upper class English (which I'm assuming is his natural accent !!!). The German accents all sound the same and not like any German person I've ever met !!! Cresswell's Rommel sounds more like Dracula from an old movie and I was expecting the Field Marshal at any moment to say “I want to suck your blood”. Cresswell's narration was so bad it made me lose concentration so many times and the only reason I didn't get lost in the story is because I know it so well.

Sadly this is an extremely poor performance of one of Higgins best works.

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4 people found this helpful

Interesting concept - almost delivered...

Reviewed: 08-09-17

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

Yes and no. The idea is brilliant - the narration was awful !!! It ended up being hard work listening to John Allen Nelson.

What was most disappointing about Harry Turtledove’s story?

Too many Americanisms and not enough understanding of other nations. Turtledove, at times, appears lazy and repeats a lot of detail. I think he tried to involve too many characters/storylines and it was a struggle to keep up as the writing jumped from one character to the next. With so many characters I found it hard to care about them and during the action scenes I wasn't concerned whether a character lived or died.

How could the performance have been better?

Getting anyone other than John Allen Nelson to read it. He has no idea how to deliver an audiobook. All of his European accents were the same, whether the character be French, German, Polish etc. And as for his British accents !!! In typical American style, all British accents were upper class English accents, no matter where they came from. At one point HT describes a British soldier as coming from Wales...Nelson's dialogue for him was no different to the other British characters...English NOT Welsh. He even struggled with some English words !!!

If this book were a film would you go see it?

I would.

Any additional comments?

I think Audible should lower this, given the poor standard of narration or it should be re-recorded with another narrator.

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2 people found this helpful