So I read *Uprooted*, by Naomi Novic, oh, years ago, and remember liking it well enough. It wasn’t super special but I enjoyed it.
Well in the last few months, I ended up on a Novic kick, discovering *Scholomance* and then devouring her other books as well – *Spinning Silver* and the *Temeraire* books. Her writing is super easy to get into, and the audio books I’ve listened to have all been well done too. Honestly I don’t know if I would have made it through Temeraire if I had gotten ahold of the text book instead of the audio book from my library.
I was in a book slump, so I decided to check out the audiobook for Uprooted, since it was the last Naomi Novic book I hadn’t read (recently) and thought it would be fun to look at it with new eyes now that I know her other stuff.
I’m really struggling with it, the sentences seeming short and blunt and choppy. But as I listen on, I don’t think it’s just that she had a totally different style, I think the audiobook might actually be quite bad?
Like, the reader is definitely affecting an accent – you can hear it fade out a few times when the exposition goes on long enough that there’s not much dialogue for a while – and that she might be so focused on that, that she’s giving a lot of weird line readings. Just, pauses like it’s the end of the sentence when I think the sentence actually keeps going. Weird inflections and emotions on stuff. The occasional “cave man speak” (“He sulk for the next week.” instead of “he sulked for the next week” etc.)
Like, am I wrong to lay this all on the audiobook? Was the original writing that stylized and choppy and I just didn’t remember that from years ago? Or is the reading of this one really that poor?
by math-is-magic