Threshold

By: David Palmer

Narrated by: Daniel Penz

All-around gold-medal-winning Olympic athlete, world-class pilot, race driver, and hugely successful financial genius, Peter Cory had every reason to be content with life and satisfied with himself.

He didn't know, however, that he was the product of a 9,000-year-long alien breeding program, that the challenge for which they had bred him was now impending, and that all the special qualities they had instilled into his DNA were about to face their ultimate test.

A malevolent cosmic force threatened the galaxy, but before Peter could attempt to save the trillions of sapient beings with which it was populated, he would have to learn to use his gifts.

And even before he could begin his training, he would have to survive the wilds of the most utterly inimical planet in the known universe, armed with only his determination and a gradually dawning awareness of his incredible potential....

©2018 Ring of Fire Press (P)2020 Ring of Fire Press

Stopped listening less than halfway through

I don't often stop listening to audiobooks. I stopped on this one. The problem is that the narration is just too slow. The story has an interesting proposition but takes forever to develop. the narrator does not help move the story along. I recommend passing on this one.

2/5 Stars Nicely Performed; Terribly Boring Story

Narrated by Daniel Penz

Performance Notes: Nicely done. Decent voice variation. A very strong performance. My issues were in not liking the main character’s inner voice (not the actor, the character). The narrator read the character true to form. I just hated the MC.

Speed is a matter of preference. I played it back at 2.5x (b/c I like them fast. 2x is standard for me).

Story Summary:
Meg—described as the most powerful witch (spelled differently) on her planet—comes to Earth to beg Peter Cory (of the primitive human race who has barely made it to space) to stop the universe from ending in a few thousand years.

Additional Story Comments: (discussion may contain spoilers)
- Has some serious pacing problems. At about the 3 ½ mark, you start to get out of the background phase. I think it legitimately took about 50 minutes to describe one crash landing.
- I think something that slows things down is the fact that many descriptions have a qualifier. (He took a few minutes to describe a mushroom. I’m pretty sure this level of description would bore even Tolkien who can describe a leaf for legit 3 pgs.)
- The perspective is first person, which is typically fine, but the main character, Peter Cory, has an inner voice more consistent with a teenage girl in a paranormal teen romance (trope – clueless MC gets recruited to save the universe by a wise, close to all-powerful mentor figure). There are also long-winded sections of “I’m so great. I never give up.”
- The way things are described can be mild amusing at times.
- The scientist’s monologues are super annoying. They function only as a consistent “oh, look what Cory did now. Isn’t he great?” refrain. These happen roughly every chapter.
- Even for science fiction, the science and magic systems have some serious holes. In general, it’s hard to believe that a society that can genetically cross-breed humans like lab rats would have a need to raise up one of the experiments to be its savior. They can look backwards in time, so shouldn’t they be able to look forwards in time too? They can control minds to a point. They are turning to humanity for an answer because they don’t understand mechanical sciences. Yet, they understand this galactic threat well enough that they get that it’s been ballistically targeting (that’s a physics term) energy systems and destroying them.
- The main character’s background isn’t believable, neither is Becky’s. People don’t typically have enough years to accomplish everything (because the training involved in those accomplishments are life-consuming).
- Memphis – the cat familiar (spelled differently); pretty much present so they get to talk to something
- Meg – is described as being 52-ish, but on Earth, she has the body of a 12-year-old. Even with the very thorough explanation of age differences, etc, that still strikes me as skeevy. She also arrives without a stitch of clothes (again, there’s an attempt at an explanation). The sex scene is described in tasteful enough terms that I’d still be able to categorize it as a “clean” book up to that point. Despite landing on Earth mere hours before, Meg has a complete grasp of the English language, so does Memphis, the cat familiar. She disappears midway through the book once her goal of calling the hero forth has been accomplished.
- There are some cool concepts, but then things lapse into a hum-drum conclusion. The only way to succeed at their mission is to combine their minds. And the only way to combine their minds now that Peter’s past puberty is to have sex.
- Side note: pretty sure this would annoying me to no end to read because there are great, long discussions about how many words from Meg’s planet and Earth are similar. Explanation: Ooops, that’s a side effect of our mind control and genetic breeding programs going awry.
- Closure: There’s a really neat twist that the author turns into a double twist that makes it less cool and more cliché. It also messes with the sense of closure and turns things into a “to be continued” vibe.
- The book’s entirely too long. It could have easily been told and told well in about 1/3 of the time if the author didn’t describe everything multiple ways. (Sometime the MC is searching for a word, so he lists 7-8 possibilities. This is a fine tactic for stuffing word count. Done in moderation, it’s fine, but this is NOT in moderation. This is overkill. Entirely over-done. Beaten a dead horse, resurrected it, and killed it again. – Do you see how annoying that can be?)
- Understand this is just one person’s opinion. The things that bother me may be things others like. It has several nice reviews on amazon. Check it out for yourself if you like flippant, long-winded scifi.

Conclusion:
I’d definitely listen to Daniel Penz again, but I’m one and done with this author.

*I received a free copy and chose to review it. All thoughts are my own.