Audiobook Review: Shadows by Ilsa J. Bick

Shadows by Ilsa J. Bick (Ashes Trilogy, Bk. 2)

Read by Katherine Kellgren

Brilliance Audio

Length: 13 Hrs 11 Min

Genre: YA Apocalyptic Horror

Quick Thoughts: Shadows is a rapidly paced, mind numbing follow up to Ashes. While the plot can become disconcertingly complex at times, it is full of gore, psychological terror and some truly stunning moments. Shadows won’t conclude any story lines in anything close to a satisfying way, but it definitely sets you up for what is sure to be a crazy end to the trilogy.

Grade: B

WARNING: This is a review of a second book in a planned Trilogy. While I try and avoid Spoilers, be careful before reading.

So, I have been thinking about Zombies. Strange, right? I have been trying to determine which is actually creepier, the traditional Romero style dead zombies, or the virus infused 28 Days Later living rage zombies. OK, before you get all up in my face, I know, I know, if they are not dead, then they aren’t really zombies. Not in the mood for that semantics argument. If you are about to be attacked by a mindless raging human, hell bent on tearing you to shreds and eat your tasty insides, I am more than willing to let you stop and take it’s pulse before you feel comfortable calling it a zombie. There is something inherently creepy about a dead, rotting corpse slowly shambling towards you, reeking of decay, yet hell bent on taking a nice big bite out of your meatier areas. Yet, I think live human variants of the traditional zombie come with its own level of creepiness. They are not dead, but changed. On some level, they are what they were before, just with altered thoughts or lack of them. With dead zombies, you can argue that they aren’t really human. Yet, live humans who attack, and consume us, no matter what their mental state totally gyrate on our most sacred beliefs and taboos. What is worse is the moral questions and the ambivalence. Your mom dies, and then rises again to eat you, well, put a bullet through that monster’s head. Yet, a living zombie is simply sick. Perhaps the sickness can be cured. How would you feel if mom changed, you pumped her head full of lead, and then the CDC announces that they have a cure for the changed the next day? My guess would be, pretty darn sucky. This is why I always find the living rage zombie creepy on its own level, and very dangerous. Any bit of hesitation and you could be lunch. I don’t want to be lunch.

When Ashes ended, Alex was in a precarious situation surrounded by The Changed. Alex is missing, but clues abound that she may alive somewhere, and Tom is assumed dead. Rule, the strange fundamentalist town that Alex was living in, is in chaos due to Alex’s escape and Chris’s return. Lots of strange revelations and realizations about the very nature of Rule happen. Then we wait a year in a cruel state of perpetual anticipation for Shadows to be released. . Shadows picks up right where Ashes left us off. Bick doesn’t ease us into anything, but throws us right into the turmoil and action. I’ll admit, at first it was a bit disconcerting. Part of me wished I had read the handy prep guide Bick posted on her website before reading Shadows. It took me a while to reintegrate myself into the world, and Bick leaves very little room for that process. Yet, once I managed to get myself straight, the story took off. Shadows is told from multiple perspectives, all which contains parts of the picture as a whole, and a whole lot of misinformation, at least for the characters. This is part of the beauty and also a bit of the problem with Shadows. No character has the whole picture, and many are suffering from misconceptions or outright deceptions about what it going on. This gives Shadows the feel of a complicated jigsaw puzzle where someone has happened to throw in a bunch of random pieces that don’t fit. It’s a beautiful mosaic, but one that clouds the complete picture. There are some truly stunning moments in Shadows. Bick is great at utilizing the complicated psychologies of her characters. She takes bits of their past traumas and forces them into situations where they most confront them. If I was one of Bick’s characters, I would hate her for what she is putting me through. Bick also ups the gore ante. This novel is not for the feint of heart. It’s graphic, tragic and often very, very disturbing. While I had some struggles with the novel, the ending sequence is absolutely riveting. No matter how cliché it sounds, I was literally leaning forward on the edge of my car seat, with my heart pounding during the final moments of this audiobook. Shadows is a rapidly paced, mind numbing follow up to Ashes. While the plot can become disconcertingly complex at times, it is full of gore, psychological terror and some truly stunning moments. Shadows won’t conclude any story lines in anything close to a satisfying way, but it definitely sets you up for what is sure to be a crazy end to the trilogy.

So much of the fun of this audiobook is simply listening to Katherine Kellgren perform. Kellgren is one of those rare narrators that simply goes for it. Kellgren just unleashes the full fury of her voice, and it is really a sight…err… sound to behold. There were moments where she was reading the novel so fast and so furiously that you just were waiting for her to stop and try and catch her breath. Yet, despite the speed of her reading the pace was always concise and easy to follow. Kellgren creates real tension with her voice, building on the written word better than almost any other narrator I can think of. Her characterizations are always well thought out and authentic. She just simply pulls you into the world and never lets you leave. At times it actually hurt to push the pause button and return to reality. It’s been nearly half a year since I last listened to a Kellgren narration, but listening to Shadows reminds me why she gets like all the Audie nominations. The amazing thing is, the three performances I have listened to by her this year, Dreadfully Ever After, Among Others and now Shadows, are all very different books, yet they all felt like the were made for Kellgren. Now, I must stop going all fanboyish, and just end with this. Even if you don’t love Shadows, it’s worth a listen simply for the narrator’s performance. Being that I liked the novel as well, it was a double score for me.

Note: Thanks to Brilliance Audio for providing me with a copy of this title for review.

Audiobook Review: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dreadfully Ever After by Steve Hockensmith

Dreadfully Ever After (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Bk. 3) by Steve Hockensmith

Read by Katherine Kellgren

Audible, Inc.

Length: 9 Hrs 9 Min

Genre: Romantic Zombie Parody

Quick Thoughts: If you are a fan of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I am sure Dreadfully Ever After will be a hit. For others, it is a decent adventure comedy that suffers only a bit from being the extrapolation of one long running joke. I actually had some fun with it, although I have no plans to run back and consume the novels prequels.

Grade: B-

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dreadfully Ever After is nominated for a 2012 Audie Award in the Fantasy Category.

My first experience with Jane Austen was all the way back in 8th grade English class. To be perfectly honest, I remember almost nothing of the experience. In fact, until recently, I couldn’t remember if it was Pride and Prejudice I read, or Sense and Sensibility. I was a 15 year old boy, just busting through puberty who had just discovered Stephen King and Dean Koontz. I wanted to read about genetically engineered dogs, and insane supernatural clowns, not manners and marriage among the landed gentry of 1800’s England. Of course, that was over 20 years ago. I am older and more mature. I have experienced the stumbles and pitfalls of romance. My reading materials are much more diverse. This more mature, more open-minded version of myself still has no desire to read about the manners and marriage of the landed gentry of 1800’s England. Perhaps id Pride and Prejudice and Zombies came out back when the fifteen year old version of me was still developing his tastes as a reading I wound now be an Austen enthusiast, and married to a landed English noblewoman with a predilection for violence and mayhem in the face of an undead swarm.

I listened to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dreadfully Ever After as part of the 2012 Armchair Audies. Dreadfully Ever After was nominated for an Audie Award in the Fantasy Category. Now, being a huge fan of Zombie fiction, I was a bit surprised that the one title I dreaded most out of the 16 titles in the categories I was covering was a Zombie novel. Yet, being simply being based on Jane Austen, of whom I have established I’m not a fan of, it was also the third in a series. So, I had to decide, should I listen to the first two in a series I’m not interested in or just jump right into the book. I jumped… or perhaps leaped into it. Dreadfully Ever After takes place after the events of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Now, Elizabeth has retired from her Zombie killing days and settled down as wife to Mr. Darcy. Returning home from a visit, they are attacked by a zombie, leading Mr. Darcy to be bitten, and perhaps doomed. Calling on the manipulative Aunt Catherine, and unbeknownst to Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth and her family take on a mission to procure a possible cure to the deadly virus. Dreadfully Ever After is an often amusing adventure tale with parodic hints to mission impossible. It is more an absurdist caper that a comedic comedy of manners. While it took me a while to get a good grasp on the characters, I found the absurdist stretches to the source material to be quite well executed. In particular, Kitty Bennett, Elizabeth Darcy’s young sister, often viewed as silly, was the perfect honey trap for a vapid English Dandy, and provided the best moments of the book. Of course, being based on Pride and Prejudice there were romantic elements, yet they were offbeat, funny and in some ways quite touching. If you are a fan of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I am sure Dreadfully Ever After will be a hit. For others, it is a decent adventure comedy that suffers only a bit from being the extrapolation of one long running joke. I actually had some fun with it, although I have no plans to run back and consume the novels prequels.

Katherine Kellgren once again proves her masters grasp on accents and diverse characterizations in her performance in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dreadfully Ever After. During the moments where I was not connecting totally with the text, especially in the beginning of the book, Kellgren’s command of the narrative kept my ears glued to the auditory page. With such an over the top comedic novel, I’m glad that Kellgren’s narration, for the most part, stayed clear of over the top characterization. There were moments, particularly when voicing Sir Agnus MacFarquhar that she pushed up against that line but she never breaks it. What truly impressed me, and was a side of Kellgren I haven’t seen before was her sense of comic timing. She displayed the absurdity of the situation wonderfully, capturing just the right wry tone and easily eliciting laughs at the proper moments. This is clearly an instance where the narration of an audiobook enhances the experience of the novel.

Audiobook Review: Among Others by Jo Walton

Among Others by Jo Walton

Read by Katherine Kellgren

Audible Frontiers

Length: 10 Hrs and 39 Min

Genre: Fantasy

Quick Thoughts: Among Others is a novel full of that magical brilliance that I just cannot properly explain with words. It is the ultimate genre blending novel. It is a fantasy novel for science fiction fans, a character study for those who love well plotted tales. It is an adult novel that embraces the tropes of children and young adult literature, adding texture and created something totally unique.

Grade: A

There are two types of writing styles that always find ways to amaze me. The first style is a sort of simple workman’s style. It’s concise and clean, without an unnecessary word. The authors that use this style are supreme technicians who know just the write moment to add an adjective, and never clutter their action. It comes off seemingly easy. Reading is makes you think, "Heck, I could do this," but sit down and try, and you realize that you can’t. Sure, it’s a honed craft, but simplicity can be an art form all its own. Yet, the other type of writing that amazes me, well, is simply magic. As I read, I become ensnared in their words, yet, I have no clue why. I am taken to worlds that I’m not really interested, involved with people I really wouldn’t choose to be around, and told stories I would never actively seek out yet I am captured in their web. Somehow, an author is able to capture those achingly beautiful moments you find surprisingly in the normal mundane course of your life and put them in words. In Jo Walton’s Among Others, we have the diary style writings of a totally unreliable teenage narrator in the late 1970’s. She is a Welsh girl in a proper British boarding school who believes in fairies and magic, and is recovering from grief and neglect. It seems an almost stereotypical set up for some romantic Young Adult novel that I would avoid like one of Mira Grants apocalypse inducing plagues. Yet, based on some rave reviews by bloggers I respect, and a desire to take even more risks with my reading this year, I gave it a shot.

Among Others is a novel full of that magical brilliance that I just cannot properly explain with words. It is the ultimate genre blending novel. It is a fantasy novel for science fiction fans, a character study for those who love well plotted tales. It is an adult novel that embraces the tropes of children and young adult literature, adding texture and created something totally unique. No, it is not a perfect novel, it has a tendency to go on long rambling rants, and full of distracting side trips, yet, even these flaws only compliment a main character that is utterly impossible to fully understand. This novel lives and dies on the readers’ ability to embrace a totally unreliable narrator who, as she even admits, does not think like anyone else. Mori Phelps is that aggravating type of young genius, who is precocious, wise beyond her years, yet also self delusional, and living in a fantasy world that only part of may be true. Her thought process is irretrievably linked with the science fiction novels she loves, to the point were the vocabulary is full of terms straight out of Vonnegut and Brunner, but yet, still, even readers who aren’t familiar with those works, understand her meanings based on context. Walton makes a lot of choices in Among Others that just shouldn’t work, but the voice of her narrator is so readable and unusual that they do. Among Others is that rare book that I just simply adored, yet can not really explain why. I can understand that some may hate it, that they wouldn’t be able to embrace the main character, and will become bogged down in what could be perceived flaws of the novel. Yet, through some magic Jo Walton entranced me, and I couldn’t help but love this weird yet beautiful little novel.

Katherine Kellgren gives another enchanting performance in her reading of Among Others. She reads it in a sing songy Welsh accent, that comes off a bit much at first, but as you ease into the story it perfectly suits the feeling of the novel. By the end of the novel, I was jarred back into reality when the "This is audible" guy came on, longing to be taken back to Wales embraced by the characters at the novels finale.  This is an audiobook for listeners who prefer performance over the simple reading. Kellgren gives life and authenticity to Mori’s character and I believe, does a true service to Walton’s quirky novel. Among Others is one of the short listed novels in the Indy Lit Awards in the speculative fiction category, along with Ready Player One, The Magician King, and 11/22/63, and I really don’t envy the judges who must choose a winner from this group.

Audiobook Review: Ashes by Ilsa J. Bick

Ashes by Ilsa J. Bick

Read by Katherine Kellgren

Brilliance Audio

Length: 11 Hrs 6 Min

Genre: Young Adult/ Post Apocalyptic

Quick Thoughts: Ashes does a service to fans of Post Apocalyptic novel, introducing younger readers to the genre in a way that should hook them in, building a fan base to help keep the genre going strong.  The author explores a lot of areas that long time fans of end of the world tales will recognize, but does it with a new modern spin that will keep listeners enthralled.

Grade: B+

As I often fail to point out, The Guilded Earlobe is a full service audiobook blog, well, except if you want me to rewrite the publisher’s summary, or wash your car. I like to do more than just tell you what book rules the universe, or lament the narrator who decided to read some dark fantasy in a chipmunk voice. I like to share the lessons learned through the books I have experiences. That is why, often, when I review a post apocalyptic tale, I like to extend a very important service. Since we are only a year away from when those wise Mayan calendar makers decided the end of the world would be, and since that means soon we will all be scrounging for food, and starting crazy religious cults, I like to offer you tips that I learn from listening to post apocalyptic novels to help my readers survive. Often, these tips are learned from the incredibly stupid actions of the characters of the novel, which is no criticism of the author, since realistically, there will be plenty of people doing incredibly stupid things when the apocalypse comes. Today’s tip is brought to you by Ashes by Ilsa J. Bick. If someone just set off an EMP killing millions and turning teenagers into raving zombie like killing machines, and you find a nice little out of the way cabin with enough supplies to last you through the winter, stay there. Sure, you may get stir crazy, and you may want to go out into the world and see what is going on, but really, stay put for as long as you can before heading out into the world. Of course, staying put in a cabin really doesn’t make for good fiction, so don’t expect people to write a novel about you.

I really wasn’t sure what to think about Ashes when I first started it. I have read an EMP novel before, William Forstchen’s One Second After, but Ilsa J. Black does some interesting things with this novel. The EMP pulse does more than just knock out electronics, but it seemingly messes with the electrical impulses of the population, killing some, while changing others. I found the concept brilliant, and a great set up, yet Black also goes and creates an extremely annoying character names Ellie. Ellie is a young, temperamental girl who freaks out at everyone trying to help her whenever she gets a chance. Now, I have to give a hand to the author, I am getting sick of all the “mature beyond their years” child characters in books,, but Ellie, especially as the novel opens, was quite annoying. So yeah, part of me was hoping she may fall off a cliff, or get eaten by wolves, but eventually, I sort of became found of her in a “If you let me punch you in the face, then we can be friends” sort of way. Luckily, I found the other characters, especially the main character Alex, more complex, and interesting, even if many of the male characters failed to see her for the strong person she was, and just wanted to protect her, and keep her locked away. Ashes is a Young Adult novel, and I think it’s the perfect primer for teenagers who want to become obsessive Post Apocalyptic fans like myself. The first half of the novel is full of action, and survival, and I think it will hook many younger readers who are just getting into the subgenre. The second half was a more nuanced introduction to many of the tropes of post apocalyptic fiction which long time fans will appreciate.  Ashes is part of a series, so the ending is a bit abrupt, but the set up moments of the finale is quite chilling and well done and will leave the reader with a lot to look forward to in the next edition.

Ah, the narration. Katherine Kellgren is a prolific narrator, yet this is my first time listening to one of her performances. The first half of the novel she reads at a lighting quick pace that kept the listener scared to pause the audiobook for fear they may miss something in the microsecond it takes for the device to register the command. Also, early on, I found myself having to lower the volume in order to handle her performance of the Ellie character. With a character that is supposed to be young and annoying, it’s only appropriate for the narrator to give the character an annoying voice, yet, well that still doesn’t keep it from being annoying. It is the second half of the novel that Kellgren really begins to shine. She has a flavor to her voice that I could never really pinpoint but it brought the prose alive in unexpected ways. She makes smart choices with her characters, and has quite an impressive vocal range. Ashes does a service to fans of Post Apocalyptic novel, introducing younger readers to the genre in a way that should hook them in, building a fan base to help keep the genre going strong.  The author explores a lot of areas that long time fans of end of the world tales will recognize, but does it with a new modern spin that will keep listeners enthralled.

Note: A special thanks to the good people of Brilliance Audio for providing me with a copy of this title to review.