Kate McLachlan

I have to say that I struggled through this book. I wanted to quit shortly after starting but I’ve had such bad luck with books so far this year that I felt the need to finally finish something – and it’s only a bit over six hours long.

I’ve been trying to come up with good things to say about Ten Little Lesbians but, honestly, I don’t think I can. I didn’t find a single character likable or complex. The narration didn’t help that at all. The narrator, who I’ve actually had some professional contact with and is a very nice and generous person, has a fantastic voice for broadcasting but the character voices were distracting to me. Some of the characters spoke with a very deep, slow, velvety voice and others sounded like either whiney teenagers or overly enthusiastic, overly cheerful neighbors. The use of crisp diction and pronunciation also made the dialogue feel unnatural.

Mixed in with the interpersonal drama and sex is a murder mystery. I can’t say that I was curious about who the killer was. I did, however, find myself wishing that I could pick the next victims. I particularly wanted Tish to meet her demise. She was skeevy, an incredibly immature nearly thirty-year-old, and after she made the comment “you’re really insightful for a blind person” or something like that, I wanted to punch her for being a moron. Honestly, I didn’t care even a tiny bit about any of the women in the story. Not one.

With regard to the quality of the audiobook, itself, there seems to be some editing issues. Over the past several years, I read almost solidly audiobooks and I’ve never come across one that had problems with the editing. But this one, this one has repeated lines (partial phrase at the beginning of a sentence repeated twice as if one of them was supposed to have been removed) and mid-chapter announcements (“Chapter two continued”) which happened several times. There was also the decision to have a woman singing a song spliced in which was super jarring. The sound quality of the recording was considerably different from the clear, deep narration which didn’t help. I skimmed the song which would play for a bit, then talking for a bit, then more song.

The author has several books published but this was my first read of her work. I don’t think I’ll be going back to read any of her previous releases. Sorry but there’s no way I would recommend this book to any of my friends. If I hadn’t gotten this for free from the publisher, I would have returned it for a refund hours before the end.… (mehr)