Too many

I have a problem following too many characters and alien types and what and who is what without visual cues. For mind like mine with limited attention span, this book would work better as a comic or a movie. Our a print book with an alien race glossary in the back. Maybe even a character register. The narration was fine, given the source material.

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More dross than gloss.

Six alien races, five concurrent storylines (not including subplots!), and God only knows how many characters prove too much for one humble narrator. Some of the alien races sound like South Park characters!

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Whoops

Brightness Reef is not part two but is part one. my bad.

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The narration not the book

I rarely give bad reviews but I have to make an exception. I like Brin as a writer and I listen to a lot of audio books. I can usually get into a book even when the narration is not great. The narration here is impossible to listen to. Wilson has decided to read the alien voices, which make up most of the narration, with deliberately atonal intonation and random vocal emphasis. It may have seemed like a great idea at the time to convey alienness,, but after 20 minutes or so you lose total sense of what he is saying and the will to carry on. Just could not listen to it despite really wanting to hear this book. Shame. You have been warned.

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1 person found this helpful

struggle to get through

Enjoyed some other uplift saga books but this one was a real struggle to finish. i listened to multiple chapters multiple times just to try to get the grips on what on earth (jojo) is going on. Even after finshing it... i coundn't tell you what happened any more precisely than some vague outline in 3 sentences. maybe it's a good paper book that becomes difficult in audio format because of the style of the language? maybe the narration itself? most likely both and more, but out of the hundreds of books I've listened to, i think only 2 were so hard to get through. not because awfully boring, just because it doesn't work in the format.
may try to find a paperback instead.

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Repeats the same illogical sequences.

This is the first in this series I've paid for both in cringes and a credit, the narrator slows his voice to a crawl for certain characters and the main theme of the planets regressive religion is repeated so many times I skipped forward often, yet somehow missed absolutely nothing relevant to the story. 1 star, 10 hours left of the book and I've given up.

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