Joan

Not what I expected

Reviewed: 04-22-20

This was not the book I was expecting. I thought it would be historical fiction about an apprentice scribe; instead it is a fantasy with fairies and all of the characters out of Robin Hood. If that's what you want, it's okay, but not at all my taste.

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Awful narrator

Reviewed: 05-09-19

The story is ho-hum, not too bad, but the narrator is terrible. If you cannot find someone with an authentic English accent, then just have someone read it without the horrible affectation this narrator has.

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Disappointing

Reviewed: 03-01-17

I got this book after enjoying the author's earlier work on Salt, but now I wonder how much I should have trusted that. This thin popularization is not really about paper so much as the history of writing and printing, and there are many other works that do that history better. This one is superficial and misleading about real history. But it gets worse. There are numerous downright errors, as well as several serious misunderstandings. It doesn't help that the narrator mispronounces many words and names.

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8 people found this helpful

Great story, horrible narrator

Reviewed: 09-19-14

Please find a different narrator for this great series of books! I've long been a fan of Carola Dunn, but the narrator of this one and at least one other is just awful. Not only does she have an affected inaccurate fake English accent (it would be better to have someone without an English accent at all than this fakery), but she also doesn't know how to pronounce a lot of words properly, especially proper nouns. For example, the South African town of "Mafeking" is NOT two syllables, but three, something anyone with the slightest knowledge of the Boer (another mispronounced word) War would know.

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7 people found this helpful

Good story, terrible narrator

Reviewed: 05-01-14

I am a longtime fan of Carola Dunn's Daisy Dalrymple books, but this performance was horrible. It is extremely distracting, and insulting, to have a narrator use a fake English accent (and badly); if you don't have an English narrator, just get a good narrator to speak normally! Not only was the accent totally wrong, so were the characterizations of various characters, especially of Alec, who comes across as a real jerk (which he is not). Also, the narrator mispronounced numerous placenames (Gloucester, Berkshire), as well as ordinary English-language words ("pique" does not have two syllables). I hope this narrator will not be doing the remainder of the Daisy Dalrymple books.

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14 people found this helpful

Good story, awful narrator

Reviewed: 02-11-13

The story is a good one, though a little thin on detail: or rather, with great detail in some parts, then sudden shifts with a great deal of action not described, but finished. Still, a good period story. The narrator, however, is awful: why employ someone with such a terrible phony British accent? It would be better to have it read out in straight American accent if a true British reader cannot be found.

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3 people found this helpful

Compelling Story

Reviewed: 12-19-12

This is a compelling story that will keep you listening. The narrator's viewpoint is well managed, although she shows a little too much self-understanding for a real adolescent. Still, it was a good cathartic look at coming of age.

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Simplistic

Reviewed: 12-19-12

A disappointing book. Instead of the measured history of financial fraud I was expecting, this work focuses on a simplistic "shocked" approach to modern events and reads history in their light rather than on appropriate contemporary terms. If you're looking just for reassurance that you have a right to feel affronted, then this book will give it. If you're looking for actual understanding, seek elsewhere.

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Virtually incomprehensible due to narrator

Reviewed: 11-10-12

In more than fifteen years listening to audiobooks, this is the absolute worst performance I have yet encountered. The narrator of the first section is evidently not a native speaker of English, and her accented text is practically impossible to understand, let alone follow in any enjoyable fashion. Arrgh! There are the bones of a good story lurking, but I'll be darned if I could extract it.

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7 people found this helpful

Good yarn, though improbable.

Reviewed: 08-10-12

It's a good story, but the narrator's repeated mispronunciation of one chief character's name (the "z" in Agassiz is silent) was a continual annoyance, like fingernails on a blackboard.

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