Lair of Dreams by Libba Bray

Lair of Dreams by Libba Bray

(Random House Audio, 2015)

Read by January LaVoy

This title is a nominee in the 2016 Audie Awards: Young Adult Category

From Goodreads: “After a supernatural showdown with a serial killer, Evie O’Neill has outed herself as a Diviner. With her uncanny ability to read people’s secrets, she’s become a media darling, earning the title “America’s Sweetheart Seer.” Everyone’s in love with the city’s newest It Girl…everyone except the other Diviners.

Piano-playing Henry DuBois and Chinatown resident Ling Chan are two Diviners struggling to keep their powers a secret—for they can walk in dreams. And while Evie is living the high life, victims of a mysterious sleeping sickness are turning up across New York City.

As Henry searches for a lost love and Ling strives to succeed in a world that shuns her, a malevolent force infects their dreams. And at the edges of it all lurks a man in a stovepipe hat who has plans that extend farther than anyone can guess…As the sickness spreads, can the Diviners descend into the dreamworld to save the city?”

Creepy, taut, and populated by a diverse gang with varying abilities and strengths, book 2 of the Diviners series makes good on the promise of book 1. Having defeated an actual demon, Evie’s personal demons have her at bay, while Ling and Henry delve into dreamworlds that Bray seems to delight in creating expressly so her readers can no longer sleep easy. There’s less outright horror and more pervasive terror in this novel, with hints of creepiness to come in future installments.

January LaVoy is a stunning narrator. Lyrical, strong, witty. She handles the myriad voices and accents and emotional tones with ease, never overdoing anything, not even the creepiest dream-whispers. This novel would be a challenge for anyone to narrate, and it’s wonderful for us all that she’s paired up with Bray for this series.

This is my pick to win the Audie!

Armchair Audies Category Report: Teen Fiction

I love listening to YA books. It works well with my desire to listen while on the job, generally - being more plot-driven than writerly - so as long as it's not too full of vampires and self-indulgently tragic teens, I like it. So I was delighted to sign up to opine about the Audies Teens category for the Armchair Audies.

Here are the nominees - as I said with my post about the Literary Fiction category, the 'read' link below includes a sound sample so you can judge my judging. 

INHERITANCE Christopher Paolini Read by Gerard Doyle (Listening Library) Read the review
THE FAULT IN OUR STARS John Green Read by Kate Rudd (Brilliance Audio) Read the review
ENCHANTED Alethea Kontis Read by Katherine Kellgren (Brilliance Audio) Read the review
THE DIVINERS Libba Bray Read by January LaVoy (Listening Library) Read the review
DODGER Terry Pratchett Read by Stephen Briggs (Harper Audio) Read the review

I have thoughts. :)

Inheritance is in last place for me. It's not Gerard Doyle's fault - I've enjoyed his narration of the Eragon series, he's great with tension and emotion and all the funny names involved. But this book didn't need to be 31 hours long. It didn't need to be 21 hours long. The convoluted wrapping up of the series just didn't flow nicely for me, so I was too often bored or frustrated while listening. So blame Christopher Paolini - or his editor - and enjoy anything else Doyle narrates.

The next three are all yummy texts, so it's harder to rank them. I'll put Diviners at the bottom of the bunch, despite my major fondness for Libba Bray, whose Beauty Queens I (correctly) pegged as the Narration by Author Audie winner last year. January LaVoy's narration is sweet and she handled the tension really well, but there is something a little too plummy about her voice that keeps me at a distance. I felt that this book - which takes place in the world of flappers and mysterious happenings in 1920s New York - should have had a narrator whose voice was younger and a little rawer. It's rare that I think a book would be better in print (as opposed to just as good, or better), but I wish I'd read this one instead of listening. 

Dodger, as I've said, is a grand character in a not-quite-grand-enough book. I loved listening to it, because Stephen Briggs was as sharp and bright and clever as the character he was telling us about, but Terry Pratchett's novel wasn't quite the gem I'd wished it to be. 

A gem in truth: Alethea Kontis's Enchanted. It is a treasure of a book, and Katherine Kellgren is pure magic as a narrator of YA books. (Of others, too - I follow her from genre to genre, but rarely in non-YA is she called upon to growl or howl or croak.) Her characters, be they human or fairy or frog, are charming and true and as I posted when I first listened to this book, I was caught up from beginning to end of the entire tale. Though I think Kellgren should automatically win every award, and I consider this as exemplary as it gets, I suspect the winner this year will be:

John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, narrated by Kate Rudd. There's a reason everyone you know has read this, even if they don't have teens in their lives pushing it on them. It's sweet and sad and smart and so very superb. I'll repeat: an amazing listen, but difficult, especially if you're not into bawling with headphones on. Rudd has an excellent teen voice, sarcastic and unsure and headlong and scared as the plot demands (and this plot demands a lot, emotionally, from the reader.) All thumbs up.

Triangles - Geometry off the Page

This is another audiobook review for Audiobook Jukebox - the publisher sent me the discs.

Ellen Hopkins's Triangles (AUDIOWORKS, 2011, 8 hours) would be an excellent book to read in print, I suspect. I certainly have heard / read raves about it from trustworthy sources. I'm not familiar with her YA writing, but Hopkins brings a deft touch with poetic language to her comfortably paced adult novel about three women doing some mid-life soul-searching. Unfortunately, the narrators and the characters just didn't gel for me. The three women are Holly, her best friend Andrea, and Andrea's sister Marissa. All three are caught up in - and in need of escape from - lives that too often revolve around home and children. As my friends and I say, they need a little "me time." They don't always go about it in the psychologically healthiest ways, however.

Holly (voiced by January LaVoy) has it all, from an outside perspective. Staying at home with their three teens while her husband makes a success of his career, she finds herself unfulfilled, longing for the opportunities that might have been - if she'd finished college, if she's stuck with one or another of her hobbies, if, if, if. When she finally takes action, she takes extreme action - extramarital sex, and lots of it, so that the erotica she then writes doesn't have to rely much on her imagination. Although I generally liked LaVoy's voice talents, I felt she wasn't entirely connected with the non-raunchy sides of Holly's character, and because Holly was the least engaging of the three, this whole storyline was the weakest for me.

Andrea (voiced by Janel Moloney) is a single mom with an unfulfilling job at the DMV, who has been disappointed by her ex and past boyfriends and has chosen to stay celibate for a time. She's wary, watching Holly's implosion, but tries to stay connected to her friend while being dragged along to clubs and venues that aren't really to her taste. Despite that reserved side of her, which Moloney seemed to have grabbed as the only useful trait when voicing her, Andrea is smart, witty, attractive, and by far the most compelling character. It's primarily the disconnect between Andrea and Moloney that disappointed me and cast a pall over this entire production. It's both difficult and annoying to have to disregard the manner in which a story is badly narrated to get the full impact of the narrative.

Marissa (voiced by Jan Maxwell) is, like Holly, a SAHM with a successful husband. Her story is vastly different, though - raising a gay teen son and a terminally ill little girl leaves her without a second for anything approaching narcissism or hedonism. Not helping matters are her husband's frequent business trips and frequent drinks when he is home, much less his disapproval of his son. Marissa's was a painful story, and Maxwell was the only narrator who really touched me and made me cry - or let Hopkins's text make me cry - though the unrelenting bleak horizon she faced for so much of the novel made this part hard to always connect with. Much more than the other two, Marissa's story was easy to map out from her introduction, but Maxwell's talents kept me listening.

Interspersed with the three womens' stories were narrative poetry (voiced by Michele Pawk, who I could listen to read poetry for a good long while, I think.) These sections reflected on the geometry and the universality of the journeys the women took, and Hopkins cleverly and carefully uses them to elevate her novel from one with a lot of sex and fighting to one that asks probing questions and refuses to give you stock answers.