Author: Caragh O'Brien
Narrator: Carla Mercer-Meyer
Genre: Dystopia, Romance
Producer: Tantor Media

Story Review: Review of Birthmarked | Review of Prized

I hope y'all know that I love this series (though to be honest, I'm not like Prized as much as I listen to it. Conflicting moral opinions), but I do not love these audio books. I don't know that I've ever listened to a "Tantor Media" book, and I think I shall avoid listening to them in the future. If I weren't trying to refresh my memory so I could read Promised, I would not be listening to these.

Why? Well, for one the recording quality isn't very good. I can hear the author swallow quite a lot, or take a drink. And sometimes I can tell where the audio is cut together because her tone changes. And at one point during Birthmarked I though I heard something fall over...

But the main reason I don't like these audiobooks is the narrator herself. She has a slight lisp, which always drives me crazy, but there was something more than that: she pronounces this SO WEIRD! Sometimes I found myself wondering if she is seeing some of these words for the very first time, almost like this book is building her vocabulary. But like most people who see a word for the first time, she doesn't say it right. And I don't mean she says it in a different dialect or accent, I mean if she had ever heard this word before she would know that no one pronounces it that way. I occasionally wondered if maybe English wasn't her first language, but couldn't detect any accent.

She also isn't consistent with the way she pronounces things. The main characters name is Gaia, which sometimes she pronounces Guy-Uh (How I think it should be said), but sometimes she pronounces it Gay-Uh. And she does that with lots of other things too. Whether she was wrong/right, I wish she was consistent!

I wonder if that's something I should blame on the narrator, or the editors. I feel like her supervisors should have caught that and said "Watch how you pronounce Gaia's name." or "Cicada is actually pronounced Sih-Cay-Duh, try that again."

Regardless, BIG fan of these books, NOT a fan of these audiobooks.