Steles of the Sky

Good story, poor reading

Would you listen to Steles of the Sky again? Why?

No, because the performance wasn't great and I already know how the book ends. I've got lots of other books I can re-listen to.

What did you like best about this story?

I liked the scope. I liked the characters. They had the sort of purity of purpose and iconic qualities that you expect from epic fantasy, but were still rounded and well-built.

What didn’t you like about Celeste Ciulla’s performance?

She would inexplicably pause in the middle of sentences and phrases. It was as though she was reading just a few words at a time, speaking them, then going back for the next handful of words.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

I think I chuckled at a couple points. I'm not prone to crying at books, so that's actually doing pretty good on my personal scale.

Any additional comments?

I used whispersync and swapped back and forth between reading and listening, sometimes several times a day. As a mono-lingual English speaker, most of the character names in this series were really unfamiliar. The audiobook helped a lot with getting it where I could picture the pronunciation in my head as I read. However, that also meant there were times when I had to go back to the book and figure out just who a character was because I would never have guessed a particular pronunciation.

That made for a really cool/interesting/different experience.

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Confusing Narration

I read the first two books on my Kindle, because I won a ARC of Steles of the Sky from the author on Twitter back before it was released. I loved the first two books and read them over a weekend. When it came time for me to pick up the physical book, I was spoiled by the ability to read discretely at work. I put the book aside and finally decided to pick it up again as a audio book.

I should never have done this. In fact, I'm going to re-read the book because the narration ruined it for me. I had to turn the narration speed up to 1.5x because I was getting confused by the narrator's long pauses. She did an amazing job of pronouncing the extremely difficult names but it felt like she would spin out a few of those names, pause to catch her breath or congratulate herself for getting them right, and then continue on with the rest of the sentence.

I feel so bad that I didn't enjoy the narrator on this book. It's only the second time a narrator has completely ruined a book for me and I'm really disappointed it was on this book. I'd been looking forward to it so much.