Author: Polly Shulman
Publisher: Audio Books
Rating: worthy
The Wells Bequest was read by Johnny Heller and I was not impressed. His voice was entirely wrong for this novel and his delivery, while not horrible, just wasn't there for me.
I pulled this off the library shelf thinking that it looked interesting. I had a choice between this and the first one in this series, and chose this because it was shorter (less time wasted if I didn’t like it!), and because the two entries in the series didn’t seem to be connected at first. They are connected, even employing some of the same characters, but they're not a series in the usual sense. The Wells Bequest is billed as a companion to the earlier volume (titled The Grimm Legacy), so it might help to have read that, but you actually do not have to have read the earlier one to read this.
It was an odd experience, listening to this, because I started out liking it, then became disenchanted with it, then started liking it again at the end. Maybe reading the novel would have presented me with a better experience, but my problem with this novel wasn't confined merely to the audio experience. The story itself appeared to be going nowhere. Yes, the reader wasn't right for this novel; his voice was way too mature, and of the wrong type for a story about sixteen-year-olds, and this was not at all helped by the fact that the story seems to have been written at a maturity level below that of the characters in it, but the novel itself wasn't interesting in large part. The characters were flat and a bit tedious, and I found myself skimming tracks rather than listening all the way through because there were a lot of uninteresting bits.
The novel is the second in a series about a circulating library which lends out not books, but objects from fiction, which have the same powers in real life as the fictional objects did in their initial setting. I don’t see how this is supposed to work within the framework of the novel. You possess HG Wells's time machine and you’re going to loan it out like a library book so anyone can play with it?! That's simply not going to happen in any realistic story framework! So the premise doesn't work unless you're writing this for ten year olds or younger, which the style in this volume supported. Unfortunately, the characters are in the mid teens, which made no sense to me.
The villain was once again a Brit. They seem to have taken over from Middle Easterners as the designated villains in movies and novels lately. The problem with this villain was that his only motivation was unrequited "love", and for this he was prepared to petulantly destroy whole cities. It doesn’t work, and especially not when his entire life's philosophy is turned around at the end by true love, and so rather than face consequences for his actions, he's rewarded, and he magically forgets all of his interest in his previous obsession? It doesn’t work. Neither does the issue of time-travel unless it’s exceptionally well done, because no matter what goes wrong, you can always go back to an earlier time, and fix it. Too few writers seem to get this, or they do get it, yet they cook-up really asinine excuses as to why it’s not possible to fix things that way in their novel!
I adore time-travel stories if they're done well and as I said, I had the chance to pick the first in this series (not actually realizing it was any kind of a series), but I rejected that because it had more disks than the second and I wanted to start in on this author with a relatively short tale in case it was less than thrilling! It was less than thrilling; now I don't want to listen to anything longer by the same author, and certainly not one which is read by the same reader!
One reviewer said, "Leo and Jaya figure out a plan to use the time machine from Orson Wells' book, go back in time, and warn Nicolas Tesla" Someone has a wire or two crossed! I rather suspect the reviewer meant HG Wells's book, and Nicola Tesla! This same reviewer added later; "There were a lot of fun historical notes in this book, about both historical figures (such as Leo Tesla)..." Ah, the value of a good editor! Having said that, it seems that a significant number of those who disliked this novel actually did like the first in the series, but I can't comment on that.
I mention other reviews not to make fun but to demonstrate what a hard time I had in deciding how to rate this. Like I said, I was all set to declare it warty, and then I listened to the last disk and it turned out that I started liking the novel a lot more at that point, so I'm prepared to rate it worthy with a note that I didn’t like all of it (but I did like just enough, apparently!). One of the biggest problems, as I've mentioned was Frank Heller's reading. I think that had a much larger influence on my view of the novel than it ought, and certainly more than I thought I was allowing for. There's a caveat there for future reference!
