Tag: format-audiobook

Three Mages and a Margarita, by Annette Marie, read by Cris Dukehart

This is total fluff urban fantasy, and utterly enjoyable. Hot-tempered Tori stumbles upon an ad for a bartending job in a mysterious club; the club a place where magic-users (called “mythics”) meet to hang out and plan adventures. Even though Tori is human, some of the mythics (who are improbably hot*) decide to adopt her, and she deems the paycheck and company worthy of returning to the job. Danger and derring-do ensue; I particularly appreciated that Tori managed to hold her own despite her lack of magic, and that the characters did not spend a lot of energy on love triangle drama. It’s the first of a series so there’s some serious info dump, but the conversation flows easily. Fun, light read.

* the conceit of “one’s magic is only as strong as one’s physical body, and therefore if you want to be a strong mage, you are motivated to work out” is as good a reason as any for the main characters to be extremely fit.

The Jade Setter of Janloon, by Fonda Lee, narrated by Andrew Kishino

Prequel novella to the Green Bone series, about a jade setter’s apprentice who chafes at his master’s conservative neutrality. Naturally there is way more going on beneath the surface of this story, which touches on how law enforcement must operate in an environment run by what are essentially superpowered mobs, as well as how bit players find ways to survive. Great reading by Kishino, who did an amazing job portraying both Green Bone thugs and quietly powerful Clan Pillars.

The Verifiers, by Jane Pek

I finally listened to an audiobook all the way through without falling asleep! I think this is actually due more to the strength of the narrator, Eunice Wong, who did an amazing job and colored the characters beautifully, than to the book itself which dragged a bit in parts. The protagonist is Claudia Lin, a lesbian Chinese-American New Yorker who works for a detective agency dedicated exclusively to verifying claims that people make on dating apps. She keeps a lot of secrets herself, namely from her mom (who is impatiently waiting for her to find a nice Chinese boy) and her siblings (who think she is still working at the finance job that her brother found for her). Claudia’s narration is peppered with literary and pop culture references, but that doesn’t save her from coming across as annoyingly naive; the mystery that should drive the book is confused and not terribly interesting. There’s a running theme of interrogating the lies we tell ourselves to attract the people we think we need, which gets a bit lost in the unnecessarily complicated plot. What really animated the story for me was Claudia’s interactions with her family; all the characters, as well as their simmering frustrations with one another, come alive in Eunice Wong’s reading, and I liked how their unique inputs ended up meshing with the mystery-solving plotline in the end.

The City Born Great, by N.K. Jemisin

I listened to the audiobook of the short story that grew into the novel The City We Became. The reading is amazing; Landon Woodson did a great job with the audio. I enjoyed the book but I really love the compact focus and punch of the short story.