Welcome to my (hopefully not a complete car-crash of a themed month) Audiobook April. Like I said last month before I took a small, Easter blog holiday, this month is me trying to showcase some lovely audiobooks (and to get my audiobook TBR list down a little). Also, to have a little fun (fun is the name of the game this blogging/reading year)!
So, let’s start with something light, something easy, right? Nope. I listened to something short (my podcast backlog is getting quite long so, hopefully, will be able to have a listen to a few of them this/next month).
What I listened to is two short stories from the Into Shadows collection, a collection of short stories from Amazon. Amazon do a few collections of Amazon Original Stories, all short stories or novellas that, they hope, you will be able to read or listen to in one sitting. Very similar to Quick Reads.
The two am going to chat briefly about are The Six Deaths of the Saint by Alix E. Harrow (narrated by Saskia Maarleveld) and What the Dead Know by Nghi Vo (narrated by Natalie Naudus).
In The Six Deaths of the Saint, the Saint of War comes to an ill servant girl so she can fulfil her destiny to come the kingdom’s greatest warrior. But will it be worth it?
In What The Dead Know, a woman posing as a medium finds herself trapped in a school due to a blizzard starts to hear something. A voice in the dark that wants to be heard…
Now, I have listened to two other short stories from this collection last November (Garth Nix’s Out of the Mirror, Darkness and Veronica G. Henry’s The Candles Are Burning) and both were okay (three stars and two stars respectively), but because I wanted to start this Audiobook April with something short that you can listen to on your drive to work…
Out of the two, I really liked Six Deaths of the Saint over What The Dead Know. While I did like What the Dead Know, I wasn’t sold on the characters. They felt a little flat and I itched for more. I’m not sure I liked the narrator’s choice on character voices, but the story and the writing were good.
But Six Deaths of the Saint felt strong all the way through. The writing, the story, the character, the narrator, all worked so well together and it felt like it worked so well in a short story format. Would this have worked as a novella or a novel? Maybe, but as a short story, it works as, though there are moments where the story repeated itself [with good reason], it never felt dull or repetitive.
I am planning to try Alix E. Harrow’s Ten Thousand Doors of January and I might snoop at some novellas by Nghi Vo (another reason I love short story collections by different authors – you discover new authors that you might not have heard of before and wanna try!)
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