Rock Chick Redemption by Kristen Ashley, narrated by Susannah Jones – B+ I said in my review of Rock Chick (I read the print version) that I imagined Amanda Ronconi reading the story to me and that this would probably mean I’d be inclined to judge the narration by Ms. Jones more harshly.  I listened to Rock Chick Rescue and Rock Chick Redemption for fun, “just for me” listens because sometimes it’s nice for me just to be a consumer and not a reviewer and I wanted my brain to relax for a bit.  But I wanted to say something about the narration.

I could wish that Susannah Jones has slightly more vocal range and could portray a larger variety of male voices  – pretty much, all the heroes sound the same and they’re really only slightly deeper in pitch than her female character voices.  (For regular audiobook listeners, this is a trade off we make fairly often. There are only so many character voices a narrator can perform and many male narrators cannot sound “female” in pitch and vice versa; however, they do adjust their tone sufficiently to give an audio cue to listeners that this is the hero or heroine talking and, provided it’s not grating, that can be enough.)

But, as for the rest, Ms. Jones was brilliant.  She didn’t have any trouble with some of the more convoluted sentences Ms. Ashley uses (which I love even though their grammar is sometimes quite tortured) and the completely nailed the humour of the piece.  I cannot even express to you how much I love her characterisation of Tex.  He is twice as hilarious on audio. Continue reading