The Last King's Amulet

The Price of Freedom

By: Chris Northern

Narrated by: Matt Franklin

My name is Sumto, and everyone thinks I am a gambling, lazy, good-for-nothing drunk. Frankly, I think they have a point. Right now I may have to join the army and fight in a war I am frankly too corpulent to cope with.

Still, it looks like being a small, short war. So that's got to be as bad as things get. Am I right?

Trained in his youth for war and politics, Sumto is interested in neither. As the son of a Patron, he should gather clients, acquire wealth, learn magic, husband a political power base and take his place amongst the Assembly of Patrons, the rulers of the city. Sumto would rather gather friends, acquire books, learn history, husband a hangover and take his place at the gambling tables. That is not going to be an option for much longer.

Unknown to Sumto, everything is about to change. There is a war in the north and Sumto is about to become a very unwilling participant.

©2009 Chris Northern (P)2015 Chris Northern

The narration was great!

Where to start, this book was definitely not “my cuppa tea” I had this book as a freebie from Kindle for a couple of years…book has a cool cover and the blurb sounded interesting……. so when I saw the audio was available for review I thought cool, great time to give this one a shot….I really wished I had passed on it. Sumto, the main character describes himself as a gambling, lazy, good for nothing drunk….. and it is a quite accurate description, in fact it might be a bit to nice….personally I found him to be a completely useless person. I did not like him and could not for the life of me figure out why people kept saving his life. I was also extremely bored…..at about the 25% point I upped the reading speed on the app to 1.5x just to get through this. When I initially read the blurb this book sounded interesting but unfortunately it was not. Because I was bored and could not find it in myself to care about Sumto or any of the situations he found himself in my mind wandered a lot while listening and most of what I heard was forgettable.

The narrator Matt Franklin is the only reason this book received more than a 1 star rating. I would say his narration was solid 4 stars, he did an excellent job differentiating the voices of the characters, and I look forward to listening to other books that he narrates.

Audiobook was provided for review by the author.

Please find this complete review and many others at my review blog

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Good story, good voicing, poor editing.

Is there anything you would change about this book?

The editing. Dead space seems to have been cut from the beginning of sentences and then jammed up against the last word of the previous sentence causing really terrible pacing.

Any additional comments?

The main detractor from this production is the editing. While listening, you get the sense that every sentence was individually recorded and cut together. This occurs because ever so frequently, you will have an unnatural lack of spacing between two spoken words. It's clear this occurs because they've cut two audio snippets together trimming dead space after/before each snippet so that they run jammed together. These poor edits compound with the fast narration style to give the reader the since that the narrator is running through the reading. So much so I had to double check my settings to see if I had accidentally set play back to 2x speed. The editing is terrible, but if you can convince yourself to ignore it--the story and characters are enjoyable. The narrator does a good job of playing different parts. The audible is enjoyable everywhere except the beginning of new sentences.

The other review that said this work was horrible was completely and unequivocally wrong

I enjoyed the transformations of Sumpto and his tale greatly. I am disappointed that audible doesn't have the sequels available.

Occasionally there were quirks or notions of Sumpto that conflicted with his previous character in ways I cannot truly describe.

A minor irritation: some lines are repeated leaving you wondering if the editing was done incorrectly.