Audiobook Review: Reawakened

Series: The Reawakened

Publication: August 11th 2015 by Listening Library

Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy

Format: Audiobook

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Lilliana Young has been the dutiful daughter of wealthy parents, living her life in a careful little box- that is, until she's inadvertently involved in the reawakening of an Egyptian mummy. Now a very confused Lilliana has been dragged into his quest, with the fate of the world as she knows it at stake.

I'm really hoping that, some day soon, I'll be able to post on this blog with a gushing review about how much I loved a book. But, sadly, that didn't happen here.

I'm wondering if maybe this book wasn't ideal as an audiobook, though the narrator wasn't terrible. Possibly the way this story moved wasn't ideal for audio? I made a lot of remarks on My Goodreads as a listened to it... There were times when this was a bit of a struggle for me to get through. The language perhaps isn't ideal for an audiobook- it was a bit dense for a spoken medium.

So listening to this as an audiobook may have impacted my experience a lot, but I also had a hard time with the plot. It was slow. There wasn't quite a flow to it, and I found myself questioning some narrative decisions. Some of it didn't quite mesh with my knowledge of Ancient Egyptian customs (though, admittedly, I am not a professor of Egyptology, just a person who spent a great deal of her childhood reading about it). Despite having never been to Egypt, even I could tell that the portrayal of Egyptian culture (both modern and ancient) is way off.

The biggest weakness in this novel was the amount of info-dumping that happened. The sharing of information was constant and obtuse, something made more obvious by the audiobook- the explanations went on for minutes at a time sometimes. This constant informing diverted from the plot, rather than explaining what was going on. No part of this story really seems to grow naturally.

I didn't particularly enjoy the characters, for the most part. They didn't feel like people to me... The info-dumping extended to the characters and their personalities. To give a character a personality trait, you can't just say they have that trait, you have to show it was well.

The romance was actually unpleasant for me to sit through. It was a lot of things that I don't like in a romance. For one thing he literally mind-controls her at one point, and threatens her, which is kind of downright creepy. (No "kind of" about it. I as creeped out.) For another I can't tell why they value each other except that they keep telling us they do. For a third, they're just boring together. Totally, completely uninteresting. I felt zero emotion for them, separately or together.

Overall, I don't think that I would recommend this, and I definitely wouldn't recommend the audiobook. It isn't my type of storytelling, and it definitely isn't the type of storytelling to work in the medium of an audiobook.

P.S. And worms are still not insects.

Kelly

I'm a reader and reviewer from Ontario, Canada, which mean that sometimes library trips take place place through a foot or so of snow. I'm going into my third year of university, studying Environmental Sciences, which I juggle with my almost constant reading. I've been blogging at at my own blog since 2012, and I'll be helping Yani out here on Paper Boulevard as a co-blogger.