Author: Penelope J Stokes (no website found)
Publisher: Books on Tape
Rating: WARTY!
Read tediously by Karen White.
This is yet another audio book where I failed to make it past the first disk. Part of the problem was the dead reading of the novel by Karen White. Another part was the totally uninteresting story. The novel is about a woman named Deborah who goes by "Delta" for reasons which were unexplained in the portion to which I listened. She accidentally gets into an all-girl folk group at college which enjoys some success. Later she marries a pastor who dies prematurely, and the novel is told from that perspective, with Delta looking back on the era - a memory which is triggered by her receipt of an invitation to a high school reunion.
She determines not to go, but we know she will, and everything will be all Mary Sue in the end, which was off-putting, but I wanted to listen to this because I thought it would be interesting once the band started up. The problem was that it never did - not in the bit I listened to, and I was completely turned off this by the endless monotonous prelude which never showed any sign of ending. There was pointless description of uninteresting events, asinine conversations, and equally boring detailed observations. I got to the point where, much as I would have liked to heard about this band, I couldn’t stand to listen to any more of this tedious info-dumping.
The uninteresting voice of the reader didn’t help at all, but even if I'd been reading this myself, I honestly couldn't have finished it. I don’t know how an author goes about deadening what could have been a really cool story about music, but this one did a real number on it. I cannot recommend this novel.
