Great news for Sanderson readers and listeners: Reactor’s serialization of Wind and Truth, the forthcoming installment in the epic Stormlight Archive fantasy series, will be joined by the audiobook chapters starting the week of August 26!
What that means: When new chapters arrive every Monday, the applicable audiobook chapters will also be available alongside that chapter’s text. The audiobook clips will also be added to chapters that have already been released.
The Wind and Truth audiobook is read by Michael Kramer and Kate Reading, an award-winning audiobook narrator team who have recorded hundreds of audiobook titles, in all genres, for over thirty years. The Wind and Truth audiobook will be released on the same day as the hardcover (December 6).
I’d like a story on the following six months of Umma’s life. She comes back to a very changed domestic world.
Her daughter and her lover are dead. Her slave, the most valuable thing she owned, is no longer hers, and is suddenly expecting pay and time off. Her family thinks she’s gone daft. Her relationship with her neighbors is changed. She’s got an unexplained bag of gold, and doesn’t know why. When people say “tell us about how you met the Emperor” she won’t know what they’re talking about. Her little restaurant is suddenly selling beer.
This book is a domestic story, but it treats the domestic changes that happen as unimportant.
Urgh. I know what you mean about the protagonist. As soon as she expressed shock – shock! – that Rome had slaves, I had to put the book down. (Even if she’s never picked up a history book, surely she’s at least heard of Ben Hur or Spartacus?)
My tolerance for idiot heroes is low.
But what happens to Nicole’s children? Isn’t she worried about them? Is she glad to get back to them? Did they even notice she was gone?
This is the kind of book I would normally like a lot, except for the part where I’d throw it across the room in about thirty pages flat.
Nicole doesn’t annoy me anywhere near as much as she does Jo Walton. Mostly, I think, because I’m a LA lawyer and deal with Nicoles pretty much every day. Even in the highly-educated people I deal with, there’s a pitiable lack of knowledge of history and even less interest. Household Gods remains a favorite for the very reason that Nicole is just a normal, unexceptional person. There are plenty of other books where the time traveler is able to MacGyver his or her way into bringing our tech back to the historical period, but most people I know couldn’t do that. I think the instantly adaptable people we always see in these books are the exception.
TexAnne: Spoiler! Their divorced father has to come back from holiday to look after them — in the real world she’s only in a coma for a week. She misses them a little, but surprisingly little, and she hardly worries about them at all, to her mind they’re safe in the future. In fact she survives because her four year old calls 911. They’re better children than she deserves.
Ursula: Yes, so would I. It was hoping I might get that, or a little of it, at the end of the book, that kept me reading the first time. Umma in LA would also have been nifty.
MichaelK: I don’t think the protagonist of this sort of novel needs to be supercompetent, but are the people you know really unaware that Rome had slaves? I think Nicole is worse than a normal unexceptional and well over into the self-centered and blinkered end of things.
Too bad. I’d have liked to read the Roman scenes, but the protag would totally put me off. If I wanted self centered and ignorant, I could talk to my SiL. ;)
I admit, I was one of the ‘couldn’t finish this’ readers, and had pretty much put it out of my mind. Your description reminds me of one of the Jane Austenish books (Confessions of a JA Addict?), where the protagonist, despite her supposed love of JA books, spends her time in the past either whining about the chamber pots or refusing to believe that she’s really there. Sigh. So what if you are in a coma and dreaming the whole thing? Enjoy the ride, damnit!
Pam Adams @@@@@ 7: Off topic, but you reminded me of the British miniseries Lost In Austen, which I really rather like because she doesn’t spend all her time whinging. She’s stuck in 1811 and she doesn’t necessarily adapt, but she’s willing to stick with it and see where it goes. She’s very aware that she’s in the past and that she could screw with the future (but that doesn’t stop her from sharing her lip gloss). She adopts their customs but only to a point (she sneaks out for smokes, snogs someone she shouldn’t, and kicks an arsehole in front of an entire ballroom). She not only understands the time period from Austen’s work but from paying attention in school. I highly recommend the British cut; the American version on is massively edited down (from 3+ hrs to 1.5).
A pretty random question, but isn’t “Umma” a name of semitic origin? If so, does that play in the story?
Linguistically ignorant: It doesn’t seem to be of semitic origin in the story. However, Jews are mentioned (once) in a relatively positive way, whereas Christians are thought of as being fanatical weirdos.