| This was the first audio book I tried out using Overdrive. My experience was mixed. The voiceover had a nice subtle Eastern European accent, but the read itself was oddly staggered as if English was a second language and the reader was struggling to come up with the right word. As such, the narrative had a sort of halting feel and I couldn’t tell if that was because of the audio software and buffering or it was an actor’s choice.
As to the story, Updated has all the elements of a classic fairy tale, but with a more modern sensibility. The heroine is strong and almost from the beginning a match or an overmatch to her teacher and lord. She takes a backseat to no one despite her own sense that she should because of societal and period pressures. The subcharacters are round and sympathetically drawn. The differences drawn out in the nature of spell craft, but the way these styles can harmonize is quite lovely. The villain is omnipresent and in the end becomes a realized, sad being of her own. I have a feeling I would have been more engrossed if I had read versus heard this book. Imagining the menace of the wood and how it envelopes and swallows its victims. Hearing the “Dragon” in my own mind’s voice might have added nuance or menace versus such a sense of a curmudgeonly old stuck-in-his-ways piece of cardboard. I still don’t get why the main character falls in love with him other than the fact that he was there. |
