Ship of Magic Audiobook Thoughts
In my slow crawl through the audiobooks (I’m aiming to go through the entire series before Assassin’s Fate comes out), I have just finished Ship of Magic.
Anybody who’s talked to me about these books knows I am superfond of the Liveship trilogy - I might do a post at some point about the specific things I love, since the reread is kinda clarifying those for me - so I went into this expecting to enjoy the words themselves. However, there are a lot of reviews on Audible bashing the reader, Anne Flosnik, so I was a bit wary on that front. I don’t trust reviewers on a lot of things, but I’m picky as hell about my Robin Hobb readers. So I’m pleased to say that I disagreed with those reviewers entirely. Combing back through the reviews, it looks like a lot of them didn’t get past the first few chapters of the book, and I think that’s part of the problem. Ship of Magic starts with the serpents, and then with a long information-filled passage about a character’s slow death. Flosnik reads these in an appropriately restrained voice. I can see how it would put some people off, but as I got farther into the book, I really appreciated how she gave each word the proper weight; her pace does change with the mood of the scene, so the more action-y parts of the book are quicker, and her intonation changes a lot when it’s emotionally appropriate. I also felt the variation in her character voices was easily on-par with the other readers of the RotE audiobooks if not surpassing them. Like, seriously, I love Paul Boehmer and I love James Langton, but their female voices all tend to sound very similar to me (the one area Elliot Hill has them beat in imo). I have no such problem with Flosnik - nor do I have an issue distinguishing her male voices. She even gives the Liveships a bit of resonance that distinguishes them from the human characters. It’s great. Also, the real reason I gave this narrator a chance was because my wife, who’d already listened to Liveship, told me Amber’s voice was spot-on perfect and her favorite audio rendition of Beloved. After listening? I have to agree. Amber’s voice is low and calm and the way she talks to Paragon brings tears to my damn eyes. This is the same narrator who reads the second and third Liveship books, and the Rain Wild Chronicles as well. Before I’d listened to her, I was concerned about that; now, I’m quite pleased. She is very well-suited to the pace and depth of these books, and I like a reader who seems just as emotionally invested as my nerdy little self. tl;dr: Anne Flosnik is awesome and I can’t wait for her to read five more books to me.
