Wai-nani: A Voice from Old Hawaii by Linda Ballou
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I have no idea how the book really was. I need to read it in print. The narration for this book is horrendous. I understand the narrator is actually rather good, but the direction for this book sucks. The narrator has a habit of reading too slow. She draws out the last syllable of the last word in every phrase and her voice goes down on the last word of every sentence. Someone else said they contacted the narrator and was told that she was doing it the way the director wanted it for dramatic effect. It was badly overdone. She sounded like a bad copy of a computer generated text to speech program. I could not follow the story because the narration was so distracting.
I only gave the story two stars because I could not follow it. I really think this book would be better read in hard copy. It is not really fair to Linda Ballou to judge her book by the narrator, but the narration was just so bad that I couldn’t follow the story. The only reason I gave the narration one star is because there isn’t anything lower. If you don’t give it, at least, one star then it just doesn’t register, so one star it is.
If this narration was the result of the direction given, then Ballou’s books need a different director for future ones.
I received this audiobook from the author in exchange for an honest review.
J Barron Owens 
I too found the narration a bit difficult to get past. The narrator left a comment on my review that she was directed to do it in this style, like trying to evoke an old epic tale. However, this story contains epic tales/myths within it and I found it hard to discern the characters of this story from the characters of myths contained within. So I think the epic tale telling style would be better for when a story character is telling a myth instead of using it for the entire story. I too think a reader would get more out of the text version of this book than the audio version.
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