Audiobook – The Warbler Books

Starfire: A Red Peace – Spencer Ellsworth

April 30, 2018 No Comments

A confession, reader, before starting this book review: when browsing Audible’s list of books for review, I saw a familiar name in the Narrator column, and chose this book before looking at the title or genre. Starfire: A Red Peace is jointly narrated by Mary Robinette Kowal and John Keating; long-time readers of this blog will recognize Mary as an author whose work I admire and someone who I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and learning from, on that cruise as well as subsequent online classes. I knew that she was an audiobook narrator, but hadn’t heard her work, so I jumped at the opportunity to listen to the first novel in Spencer Ellworth’s Starfire trilogy. Before I dig into the book and narration, I want to thank Audible for providing this book for review, and flag for you, listener, that they’re running a promotion until May 4th, 2018 that

The Last Sacrifice – James A. Moore

May 31, 2017 No Comments

What happens when the great antagonist, the villainous figure bent on destroying the world, is the divine? The Last Sacrifice, the first book in James A. Moore’s Tides of War series, places that conflict at its core. And while it’s an interesting question—what if the gods themselves are the enemy—the book invests a great deal of time in worldbuilding and stage setting, leaving the “meat” of the plot on the back burner while hopping between points of view. The Last Sacrifice is Grimdark, which is to say it’s brutal and gory, and deals with some of the darker aspects of human behavior. The inciting incident of the story, which pits the protagonist against the gods, asks about the lengths to which anyone would go to get revenge for losing their entire family for nebulous reasons. It’s a familiar concept—man loses wife and children, becomes enraged, goes on a rampage to

Miniatures: The Very Short Fiction of John Scalzi

April 21, 2017 No Comments

John Scalzi is a somewhat enormous figure in genre fiction, having published some 20+ novels, eight non-fiction books, and a generous handful of short fiction and essays. Not only that, but his role as “influencer” is further cemented by the popularity of his “Whatever” blog and his more-than 110,000 followers on Twitter. But we’re not here to talk about Scalzi’s reach as an author, prodigious though it may be. We’re here to talk about the audiobook of Miniatures: The Very Short Fiction of John Scalzi I listened to, courtesy of Audible. The eighteen stories in Miniatures are, as the title suggests, very short. In the introduction, Scalzi says that the longest piece in the collection is only 2,300 words long. The audiobook for the collection is teeny-tiny, clocking in at just under three hours. The stories are funny, and all hover around the central of subverting “conventional” science fiction tropes

The Echoes of Sin – Chris Philbrook

January 10, 2017 No Comments

(Beware of spoilers, for they be plentiful below.) The concluding entry in Chris Philbrook’s Kinless trilogy, The Echoes of Sin, does a massive amount of worldbuilding. It reminds me a bit of Mark Lawrence’s Broken Empire series, wherein after being taken on a wild journey through a fantastical world, we learn that it’s actually some kind of post-apocalyptic vision of Europe. Whereas Lawrence loosely explains it as a result of science growing too powerful for its own quantum britches, Philbrook leaves the gap between the “fall” and era of the story unfilled. I burn with curiosity as to the nature of the fall. I hope, nay, pray that he dig into it in some future date. The word ‘trilogy’ fills me with dread, however, that this story is done and that I’ll never find out more about the fascinating world Philbrook has built, where human souls manifest as spirits and

Motive For Massacre – Chris Philbrook

October 26, 2016 No Comments

The sequel to Wrath of the Orphans is, incidentally, much less wrathful than its predecessor. Motive for Massacre might sound like it gets hairy—and it certainly does—the plot of Motive follows the Everwalk twins along the path to discovering who orchestrated the destruction of their home and the slaughter of its two hundred-or-so citizens, and why. It’s a much tighter story than Wrath, owing to the fact that it didn’t have to do much world building, allowing Chris Philbrook to immediately focus on the characters and their challenges. It is also stronger as a result. I listened to Motive on Audible at double-speed, which rendered the problems I mentioned in my Wrath review obsolete. Kevin T. Collins’s narration is strong, if still a little one-dimensional. Motive spends considerably less time traveling, which contributes to its sense is focus, and lingers on description only long enough to give you a sense

Spell/Sword – G. Derek Adams

July 30, 2016 No Comments

Asteroid Made of Dragons was G. Derek Adams’s first (semi-)traditionally published work, but the man was no stranger to releasing books. As you may (or may not) recall from my review of AMoD, Adams had self-published two prequels prior to winning the Sword and Laser contest on Inkshares. The first of those books is Spell/Sword, wherein we meet the protagonist duo of Rime and Jonas and go careening through glowing canyons and flying on wyverns with them on their first adventure. Adams was kind enough to provide me with a copy of Spell/Sword in audiobook form, which is currently available on Audible, and is wonderfully narrated by Rachel Ahrens, who brings a voice and character to Rime so close to what my mind created when I read AMoD that I was a bit surprised, to be honest. She really did a fantastic job. The thing about Adams’s writing is that,

Octavia’s Brood – Walida Imarisha & Adrienne Marie Brown

May 26, 2016 No Comments

A few weeks ago, I attended a rally in support of Bernie Sanders just north of Oakland, in Vallejo, California. At the rally, I heard a sentence that struck a deep chord within me: An idea does not have to be radical to be revolutionary. It’s a simple statement, sure, but it has legs. I imagine that, during the height of the civil rights movement, there was a portion of the American population that felt the idea of racial equality was radical. But thinking about it, were people asking for anything completely new? No. They were asking to have the rights of protection, access, and representation that already existed for a majority of Americans. I don’t mean to say that radical action wasn’t taken in the name of revolution. Rather, that the desires of the movement were not radical, though they were certainly revolutionary. I think that our current politics are

Chariots of the Gods — Erich von Daniken

April 26, 2016 No Comments

Several years ago, while working at PlayStation, I was introduced to the most compelling evidence I have ever seen for the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. That there is extraterrestrial life is, to me, a given. That there is intelligent extraterrestrial life also strikes me as true, it not because of statistical likelihood, then certainly because of the aforementioned evidence. That evidence came in the form of a four hour documentary called “The Disclosure Project,” in which people who are trained observers — pilots, control tower operators, radar technicians… Mainly military and paramilitary personnel — soberly talk about their experiences with UFOs and other phenomena. I’m not asking you to watch all four hours of it, but I encourage you to check it out. It might blow your mind a little bit. “The Disclosure Project” started me down the rabbit hole of research into extraterrestrials. The issue is that the “good

A Crucible of Souls – Mitchell Hogan

April 14, 2016 No Comments

When the prologue of A Crucible of Souls started to play, I noticed a few interesting things happen simultaneously. First, I recognized instantaneously that the reader, Oliver Wyman, would be fantastic. Second, I thought “oh I know where this is going.” And finally, I thought, “this, again?” You see, over the past year I’ve found that epic fantasy has gotten a bit stale for me. This doesn’t cover all of epic fantasy, not by a long shot. But I’ve grown tired of some of the tropes endemic to the genre. This feeling was particularly pronounced when I listened to The Sword of Shannara, which I found tiresome and derivative, much to the chagrin of a few commenters on the internet. Poorly understood precursor civilizations, whose only remains are valuable artifacts, some language, and thinly veiled threats to not repeat their mistakes, lest you lead the world to a second “shattering,”

Mycroft Holmes – Kareem Abdul-Jabbar & Anna Waterhouse

December 29, 2015 No Comments

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s career has extended well beyond the sphere of his tremendous success as an athlete. He is a regular contributor to Time, has starred in many films (even opposite Bruce Lee!), and has written a number of books, the most recent of which, Mycroft Holmes, written with screenwriter Anna Waterhouse, is excellent. Audible.com generously supplied a review copy of the audiobook, which I gobbled voraciously. The narrator, Damian Lynch, was exquisite, and brought to life the multi-ethnic cast of characters with extraordinary skill. His accents were flawless—except perhaps his American, which was a bit cartoonish, but appropriate for its character. His narration was one of the highlights of the experience, and I found myself listening with two sets of ears: one to a great story, and the other to Lynch’s wonderful performance. The story follows a young Mycroft Holmes, elder brother of Sherlock Holmes, on an adventure from London

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