- Title:
- Mosaic
- Author:
- Catherine McCarthy
- Release:
- January 30, 2025
- Format:
- Audiobook
- Narrator
- Mary Phillips
Every story I review lately seems to be in this shitty first person PoV. When the fuck did that awful trash becum the default? I seriously despise lines such as: “You’d swear they came from the same person.” Why the fuck is this character in the story I’m listening to telling me what I would or wouldn’t think!?
The story itself is middling, in the worst kind of way. It hints at there being something suspicious going on, but at the same time the main character is sexist and hyper judgmental. One could argue that it’s due to her narccisit father, but her mother and sister were also part of the problem. The author spent the entire story going on and fucking on and on about what a couple of scumfucks the MC’s parents were, only to have her father show up at the very end, and proceed to do fucking nothing with him.
It’s hyper-detailed, to the point where it’s a short story padded out to the length of a novella. I wouldn’t have taken issue with this, if the ending didn’t suck so fucking hard. I thought it was building up to something. It was (as all these godawful first person stories are) a day in the life of the main character, until the last 20 minutes, where the author realized they needed to shit out an ending. Pulled a “spookily wookily Lovecraft monster!” out of fucking nowhere, and then wrote “the end”. The monster takes control? transforms? absorbs? (Don’t know, don’t fucking care) the characters in the story, stuffs its tongue down MC’s throat, “finishes”, fade to black, and she’s knocked up and ready to recruit for this thing. I normally don’t write spoilers, but this shit isn’t worth your time.
(Un)fortunately, I drew this one out for longer than I should have. I kinda-sorta have a thing for Scottish accents, and the narrator chose to do a Scottish accent for the MC, so I listened at 1x speed for most of it. I will note that I only did this because the narration was good. I’d have listened at 2x speed or faster, as I usually do if it was best-accent-in-the-world or not, if the narration was bad. For the most part, that is. She did emote for the main character, and did so well, for a bird, and was all around excellent.
The issues with the narration was when she kept mispronouncing “familiar” as “farmiliar”, and that horrible “hwh” shit.
The narrator also puts annoying emphasis on “wh” sounds, and pronounces them as “hwite”, “hwhispered”, “hwhile”, “hwhen”, and so on. Hwhitch is incredibly fucking annoying, and distracting as shit.
One particularly annoying issue was how she kept saying “O” instead of “Zero”, but what’s even more fucking annoying was how she wasn’t even consistent about it. She said: 1:o8, o8:15, 00:35.
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
If you’re going to say something wrong, at least do it consistently wrong! If you know how to say it right, then don’t say it wrong! Goddamn!
There were numerous audio glitches, and one instance of repeated dialogue. Often, there would be pieces of dialogue that sounded like somebody cut out a pause between them, or sped them up. It was mildly distracting, but didn’t detract from the performance (for me).
If it’s not clear, I have very conflicted feelings about this story. I was listening at 1x speed for most of it, eventually sped it up to 1.5x as it didn’t distort the narrator’s voice too much, and still sounded slow as fuck to me. I wanted to see where this story was going, I was excited. I think I eventually went 1.7, and finally 2x speed, as it was getting close to the ending, and I knew that it wasn’t going to be able to tell a compelling ending in time. As I said previously, this is a short story that was esentially tuned into a novella with the amount of details that aren’t needed. The best way to sum up this story is it’s fucking pointless. It takes forever to say nothing, then shits out an ending at the last moment, and calls it a day. If the ending wasn’t so goddamn awful, I’d have been fully on board with it. But to me, going “something something, spooky H.P. Lovecraft monster, the end!” is supremely fucking lazy.
Honestly, the only thing of value I take away from this is the narration. And even then, the narration should be average, at best. I really feel like “the narrator did good accents, emoted, had vocal inflections and held my attention” shouldn’t make her one of the best narrators I’ve ever heard. That should be the fucking default, but so many narrators are talentless hacks, that she rises to the peak of narrators for me. It feels like a professional was wasted on a mediocre story, when so many otherwise good stories are ruined by garbage narrators. It’s left me feeling bitter. The author had a good plot, but lacked the talent to tell the story, and a rare good narrator was wasted on a sub-par story. The end result has felt like a cumplete and total waste of time for me.
NOTE: This copy was provided to me free of charge as a digital review copy. The opinions stated in this review are mine and mine alone, I was not paid or requested to give this book a certain rating, suggestion, or approval.