Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I received a very friendly email from the Goodreads team informing me of a promotional offer by Amazon to try audiobooks for free for one month…and eventually I caved and gave this whole audiobook experience a try. Normally, I could not be persuaded, since I was always of the opinion that a narrator’s voice and their interpretation as they read the story does in fact influence one’s own experience of the story being told.
The characters were generic and predictable: the male characters handsome and somewhat brooding and the female characters pretty, cunning and with ulterior motives. The protagonist is quite frankly boring. I see what the author intended on creating, that is a perfect character with enough bad history to ensure the reader’s sympathy, but it doesn’t work. She is a collection of contradictions. She is supposed to be stealthy and a skilled assassin, yet she is clumsy and never hears when someone enters the room. The is supposed to be cold-blooded when it comes to her skills, but is constantly governed by her emotions. She is supposed to come across as feisty, but more often than not she just sounds snappy and annoyed.
The plot is very predictable. Laced with elements taken from various other fantasy stories, it provided nothing new to the ever growing genre of young adult fantasy. Twists and turns in the storyline became synonymous with the story and provided more pages for annoyance than reading entertainment.
The writing was easy flowing enough, although the constant, elaborate and very cheesy descriptions of the protagonist’s inner thoughts and emotions, and forceful forlorn description of various situations was making me bleary-eyed.
Considering the audiobook version adds a new dimension to the “reading” experience, it is only obvious that I must add a few thoughts concerning the narrator. Generally speaking, there was nothing wrong with the narrator, personally, though, I prefer narrators with a lower register (imagine someone with Idris Elba’s voice *swoon*). The narrator made the protagonist sound extra bitchy. Various sections were supposed to come across as tough, but they only sounded annoyed.
I initially had rated this story three stars, but after writing this review I must change it two stars. It was nothing special and now people think I am weird for constantly making faces in public while listening to this audiobook during my errand runs. Overall, I can’t understand the hype. It’s something to read when one has nothing else available, but I would not be itching with anticipation to read the next installment. It’s the vanilla ice-cream one would choose when all other flavours are sold out. In addition, audiobooks are a good option to catch up on one’s reading when the actual act of reading is not possible, but I will continue to make reading my priority to experience books.
