- Title:
- Tainted by Prophecy
- Author:
- Hanleigh Bradley
- Release:
- April 20, 2021
- Format:
- Audiobook
- Narrator:
- Elizabeth LaRose
- Series:
- Kumari’s Kitsune
Since it’s been a long time and many reviews since I listened to book 1, I decided to revisit it before this review. While I enjoyed listening to both books back to back, for the most part, I’m kinda over it. I’ve grown tired of this means of storytelling where (what should be) a single book is split into multiple smaller books and sold separately.
It’s a pain in the ass as a reader because you have to go through the extra hassle to get every book and never get the whole story until you acquire them all. If you’re new to it, imagine ordering a pizza and you have to place 4 orders to get the entire thing. It’s annoying as hell.
Both books 1 and 2 feel like they’re slowly and I mean slow as a snail’s pace, crawling up to something bigger. But this glacial pace means you have to sit through 8+ hours of mindless., back-and-forth drama for a payoff that might not even be that great.
As far as the content of the story goes, the only thing of note is the author’s poor choice of words. When ‘Bae’ puts her hand on her abdomen and refers to it as her stomach. There are multiple things wrong with this and it will always annoy the hell out of me. Fetuses don’t develop in a woman’s stomach, for starters. It’s her womb. Second off, if she’s placing her hand on her stomach, which is an internal organ, she has some serious medical issues to address.
The dialogue is all kinds of awful. I’ve railed against narrators who can’t pronounce basic words properly. “Farmiliar” isn’t a word, little kids know this and yet numerous narrators still say it. The audio is littered with repeated dialogue clips, at one point, you can hear the narrator smacking and it sounds as if she’s swallowing a golf ball before she repeats the line. It’s very apparent that nobody bothered to listen to the “finished” audio recording before listing it on Audible for sale.
Finally, the biggest nail in the coffin is how bad her narration skills are. She did a decent job of giving each character a distinct voice and personality. But she went on to read the entire story in the same vocal range. Regardless of the mood the author was attempting to set. It led to this stale, lifeless, boring performance that made me want to DNF both books.
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.