I don’t know what sub-genre of thriller Our Dream Home, Room 21, and Her Last Christmas fall into, but they have a formula. The female protagonist is a bit of a bitch with some sort of mental illness or disability. At some point, she tells the reader how she likes to read books on her Kindle. The book ends with her happy, single, complicit in a murder, and prestigious.
Also, every single person in the book is unlikeable. Then again, it’s not outside the norm that I hate everyone adult novels have to offer. The Casual Vacancy by J. K. Rowling, for example, had a large ensemble cast, and I hated everyone. Is this really what adults like to read?
Anyway, this post is supposed to be about Our Dream Home by Jessica Huntley in particular. My most distinguishable thought requires jumping straight to the end where the protagonist Fiona magically inherits a multi-million dollar company and smothers her husband after her son beat in his skull with a replica of Thor’s hammer (remember, this is a Jessica Huntley novel). Fiona then ties her hair back like a boss with a plan, and the book ends. What the hell is she going to do with her dead husband’s body? What is the implication? Is she going to pull a Breaking Bad and dissolve it in acid? Nothing in the book has established that. Nothing in the book established she was capable of running a multi-million dollar company competently either. Fuck it. She’s a strong, independent woman. Ridiculous.
It was obvious that Emily was Kimberley’s mom… except it turned out that she wasn’t her mom. Because nothing in this type of sensationalist thriller is as it seems. Nothing. Even when the alternative twist is insane borderline nonsense.
What attracted me to Room 21 was the name of the author Jessica Huntley. I could imagine what one of my high school friends would be doing today if she still went by “Jessica Huntley” and had become a writer of lurid thrillers. I’ve listened to several of Jessica Huntley’s books now, and I can say she’s batshit crazy.
The protagonist of Room 21 Kimberley is hired as a housekeeper at a rural hotel that serves a particular type of clientele: the family and friends of rich, incestuous murderers, rapists, and pedophiles. Her employer Jennifer argues that it’s safer for society that such criminals work out their desires within the hotel’s walls with the specialty services it offers. Despite knowing all this, Kimberley isn’t trusted with the terrible secret held in Room 21.
Two narrators narrate the book from the perspectives of Kimberley, Jennifer, and a younger, seemingly unknown character. The narrator for Jennifer and the younger character does a good job. I didn’t recognize her as the same person the first time I listened to the book. The younger character describes her time as a pregnant prisoner in a mysterious room. While her situation is desperate, her pathetic-ness and tendency to refer to her baby as “my bump” (or “my bum” as I misheard at first) also makes her sound slightly unhinged. And with good reason.
It turns out Room 21 holds the real Jennifer because the person posing as Jennifer is actually Emily, the unknown character but older and a rape victim turned prisoner of the hotel turned housekeeper turned mastermind doppelganger. With Kimberley’s help, Emily plans to kill everyone in the hotel. Jennifer is also Kimberley’s sister, revealing Kimberly as a relative of this heinous family. Is the secret within Room 21 horrifying to anyone except Kimberley? What was in Room 21 before Emily locked Jennifer in there and stole her identity? Emily hasn’t been impersonating Jennifer for that long, but the staff treat the room like it’s existed for ages. None of them knew their real employer was in there?
Throughout the book, we’re lead to believe that Emily is Kimberley’s mother. Kimberley’s father’s brother has also been Kimberley’s doctor for the past twenty years and giving her drugs that led her to believe she had severe epilepsy and asthma just because he could. Among the last reveals of the book, however, is that a completely unrelated woman Rachel Evans is actually Kimberley’s mother, and Kimberley’s real father was killed in a car crash. The real rape child was hidden somewhere else out in the world by one of the hotel staff.
Still, after helping to murder everyone in the hotel, Kimberley decides to continue working there as a housekeeper. Under the new management of Kimberley and Emily, the hotel becomes a home for victims of rape and murder. And Room 21 becomes a torture chamber for victims to exact their revenge against their attackers.
Yep.
The moral of the story is rich people are evil. Jeffrey Epsteins and worse, all of them!
Audible had been continuously hawking the Harry Potter full-cast editions at me. I didn’t know what else to spend my credits on. Plus, I’d just listened to the AI-generated slop audiobook True Crime Stories You Won’t Believe: Omnibus Edition and needed to cancel it out with some decent narration. So I decided to give them a try.
They were so good! They’re like listening to unabridged Harry Potter movies with a music score and sound effects. Lines are delivered with perfect comedic timing and dramatic flair. Usually, full-cast audiobooks are more like radio plays where there’s no narrator, only character dialogue and sound effects, which sometimes gets confusing. These audiobooks, however, have a narrator. Everything in the books is in the audiobooks.
I’m of Kiera Knightly’s opinion that I don’t care what J.K. Rowling has said. How cool is it that seven 8- to 26-hour-long, full-cast, fully narrated audiobooks exist? Such things could only exist if someone has a lot of money and a large fanbase to support it.
The only parts of these audiobooks that lost me were the fight scenes. These tended to be heavy on action music and sound effects, sometimes threatening to drown out the narrator. Even without that, I lost track of what was happening. I don’t think my getting lost is specific to these audiobooks though. It’s often a problem I have with audiobooks in general. The problem was more pronounced when it happened with these books though because the rest of these books were so good.
Additionally, sometimes it sounded like one or two of the actors in a scene got the shitty microphone. They sounded inappropriately muffled or distant in comparison to everyone else. This happened most often in the first two or three books, however, where I was listening to them with one earpiece. For most of the rest of the books, I used two earpieces and didn’t notice the same problem. Perhaps it was an issue with the audio balance or my phone failing to recognize that I was only using one earpiece.
Besides those two minor issues, these books were great! So good! Below are some thoughts I had on each specific book.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
I wonder if the opening scene from Mr. Dursley’s perspective was added to this edition. Or the moment where all the houses sung a song in the Hogwarts’ great hall.
*looks it up in a physical copy of the book* Oh, they exist! The houses singing a song was pretty awkward, so it makes sense it was in the full-cast edition because it was in the book.
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
I didn’t catch anything strange going on with Ginny except for in one scene. Listening to it a second time, I caught the hints better though. Maybe it was easier to read the hints in the first book because I remembered Professor Quirrell was the culprit.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Here are a couple quotes (perhaps paraphrased) that I thought were hilarious and well delivered:
“There is no Harry Potter here! Never call this number again! Stay away from my family!”
“Do something about your hair!”
I don’t remember Harry’s father being an Animagus. Then again, I also don’t remember Crookshanks.
The explanation for Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew seemed convoluted like the characters were saying the same thing in different ways repeatedly. I wonder how different the movie was from the book, specifically how many things it changed to make explaining Sirius concise.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
All the characters’ voices dropped at the same time, even Colin Creevy who isn’t even in Harry’s grade.
Hedwig looked EXTREMELY offended. A lot of people are extremely something in fact.
Harry doesn’t solve how to open the egg or how to swim underwater for an hour on his own. In fact, he has the answer spelled out for him or given to him. *continues listening* Oh, that was intentional!
Harry Potter’s voice actor can’t scream in pain to save his life.
Dumbledore mentions the room of requirement. Teasers for the Order of the Phoenix!
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
I remember Order of the Phoenix being my least favorite in the series to read, but for whatever reason, it’s my favorite of the full cast editions. The understandability of the ending fell apart a little, but otherwise, I loved this rendition and immediately wanted to listen to the whole thing again. Maybe it’s the level of misery Harry is subjected to. He may not be able to scream in pain, but Harry’s voice actor can play the hell out of an angsty teenager.
I wonder if there were hints in previous books that Aunt Petunia cares more about the wizarding world than she claims.
What qualifies someone to be a prefect or a best boy or best girl? Are they just Professor Dumbledor’s arbitrary favorites?
Kiera Knightly played Dolores Umbridge? I didn’t recognize her!
“Wotcher” means “What are you up to?” or “What cheer?”
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
I think Harry’s theories are wrong in every book except this one. In this one, he’s right about everything… about Snape and Malfoy at least.
Did Harry always have a relationship with Ginny in this book? *looks it up in a physical copy* He did! I always recall his marriage to Ginny coming out of left field, but reading this book again, it’s fitting. It’s probably just the movies where it doesn’t make sense.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
For how much Harry likes Quidditch, he never gets to play it for a full school year. In book 1, he was hospitalized after fighting Voldemort. In book 2, Quidditch was canceled because the monster from the Chamber of Secrets had petrified so many people that the school was locked down. In book 3, Harry was harassed into unconsciousness by dementors (although I think he actually did finish the season). In book 4, Quidditch was canceled to make way for the Triwizard Tournament. In book 5, Professor Umbridge bans Harry. In book 6, he gets detention for cursing Malfoy and misses the last Quidditch game. And in book 7, he doesn’t go to school. That sucks.
I imagine Harry’s voice actor had fun impersonating other characters for The Seven Harry’s chapter. The actors probably had fun impersonating main characters throughout the book actually.
Killing Fred, Tonks, and Lupin? That’s brutal.
There’s always a scene toward the end of a Harry Potter book where everything is explained. It seems like a comfort provided to the reader that everything will always make sense in the end. I’m sure people who get pissed off by explanatory scenes would be pissed off about it though.
Harry’s parents died in 1981, which means Harry was born in 1980… 80s nostalgia strikes again!!!
Hermione, Harry, and Ron’s voices dropped again as adults. Weird. Why would the audiobook creators decide to do that?
Despite killing a major character and disappearing another within the first ten pages, Eldest by Christopher Paolini is much slower than its predecessor Eragon. No more do paragraphs summarize weeks worth of events. The book occasionally, however, forces odd topics into character conversations. I can almost hear Paolini saying, “I need these characters to talk about this thing now.”
Another enhancement is that Eldest has multiple narrators. Eragon and his adopted brother Roran are the primary narrators. Nasuada, the leader of the Varden resistance, also narrates a couple chapters, but it feels random, like she’s a narrator only because Paolini found no other way to introduce important characters and concepts. I also had the feeling that Roran was a narrator to slow the book down and prevent Eragon from plowing through the plot as he had in the first book, but overall, the pair of them swapping chapters as narrators feels fitting and intentional.
I believe Paolini also reveals himself as a fan of Weird Al Yankovic’s UHF when a side character exclaims, “Barges? Barges? We don’t want no stinking barges!” It sounds so out of place and suspiciously similar to a quote from UHF, that it has to be an allusion to, “Badgers? Badgers? We don’t need no stinking badgers!”
As my final random thought… I’ve read Eldest at least three times now. I’ve always accepted that it made sense for the elves to reject eating meat. It was an admirable lifestyle even. I’ve since been spoiled, however, with keto and lion diet ideology, fitness nutrition, and conservative talking points. How can the elves possibly get enough protein from plants to maintain their inhuman strength? They would need to have industrial-level production of soy and beans. Even Mark Boyle, who recounted his experience living off the land and rejecting modern technology in his autobiographical account The Way Home, conceded that he had to give up his vegetarian diet and eat meat to survive. He would no longer have access to all those canned beans and soy products from distant lands to supplement his vegetables. I suppose the elves have magical abilities that include speeding up and manipulating the growth of plants, but it’s still ridiculous. I’ll save most of my complaints about this point for the next book in the series Brisingr though, where Eragon’s choice to also abstain from eating meat makes even less sense.
An omnibus is a volume containing several novels or items that were previously published separately. In the introduction to True Crime Stories You Won’t Believe: Omnibus Edition, author Romeo Vitelli justifies his choice of publishing the book as an omnibus by claiming that together his books form a more coherent whole. Each book is a collection of assorted true crime stories based on posts from Vitelli’s blog. If he means that together they form a more complete history of all crimes that have ever been committed, I suppose.
His writing reminds me of David Paulides’ Missing 411 series in which he chronicles missing person cases with strange circumstances and commonalities and seemingly supernatural elements. At the end of each case, he has a tendency to insert himself as the researcher, tying the case to similar cases, reiterating his confusions or amazement with the circumstances, or describing his frustrations with the authorities. It comes off as amateurish and repetitive. While Vitelli isn’t as egregious in self-referencing his research efforts, his writing still sounds amateurish. His style is inappropriately belittling and informal for the subject matter. Using phrases and words like “somehow” and “for some reason,” it’s like listening to a narrator who finds his own stories and the people in them ridiculous.
What attracted me to listen to True Crime Stories You Won’t Believe, however, was the narrator “Virtual Voice,” a computer-generated narrator for audiobooks as Audible explains. I’d never listened to narration produced by AI and was curious what it sounded like.
Well… with all the time they saved by having AI read a 17-hour-long audiobook, they could have at least listened to it and revised their prompts accordingly. Or maybe the producer of True Crime Stories You Won’t Believe did listen to it and, despite all the pronunciation inconsistencies and other signs of Virtual Voice lacking comprehension of the English language, decided to dump it on Audible anyway.
Here are a few highlights:
Virtual Voice pronounced EEG (electroencephalogram) as “eeeeeeg.”
A few stories included excerpts from song lyrics or poems. Virtual Voice ended each line with a verbal “slash” rather than a pause.
Vitelli snarkily wrote something like, “Why would he be there in the first place?” Virtual Voice read this as if “the first place” was an actual place rather than a phrase.
“etc. etc.” was pronounced as “Et See. Et See.”
One story featured a legend about wendigos. It also featured every possible pronunciation of “wendigo”: WENdigo, wenDIgo, WINdigo, etc.
Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World is an audiobook written and narrated by Michael Pollan that I forgot I’d listened to and Audible kept hawking it at me. So, I’ve listened to it twice now. Oh, you want to know the content? It tells the story of, as the subtitle suggests, how our population’s addiction to and dependence on caffeine created the modern world.
A fact about caffeine that I’ve always remembered since my first listen to this book: because of low water quality in the past, boiled coffee or tea was one of the safest things to drink alongside alcohol. People were more likely to live if they drank caffeine, helping to perpetuate its addictiveness.
Another fun fact: the minute hand of the clock was introduced alongside caffeine.
I don’t drink coffee, energy drinks, soda, or caffeinated tea. My caffeine primarily comes from chocolate, but I doubt my daily fix contains enough caffeine to compare to that consumed by caffeinated beverage drinkers. The world seems fast to me. There’s always a billion things to do. In some ways, I do a billion things everyday, but in other ways, I look at other people and feel incredibly slow. I tend to think that I process some information slower that other people; I prefer to process some information slowly and completely; I need more recharge time in comparison to other people; or I get slowed down by perfectionism and anxiety. After reading this book a second time, however, I wonder if the world seems fast because so many people are drinking caffeine and genuinely doing more than people who abstain from it like me could possibly do.
I listened to the original Frankenstein by Mary Shelley on Audible. It was interesting.
After discovering the “epistolary novel” in Who Was Jane Austen? Sorting Fact from Fiction, I was eager to read one of the classics for an example of one. Frankenstein is told through the narrator Robert Walton, a sea captain on an Arctic expedition. The introduction of the novel is a series of letters Walton writes to his sister. The rest of the novel is a novel that Walton writes for his sister, relating the story Frankenstein tells him, the story Frankenstein’s monster tells him, and Walton’s own experiences of the two.
In some ways, Frankenstein seems like a deeply flawed novel, at least by modern standards. Arguably, Walton is discardable, and his presence negates the need for Frankenstein and his monster to ever interact or make peace with one another by telling each other their story. Walton serves as the link to reader in telling the two stories.
The melodramatic writing could also be seen as a problem. Today, melodramatic writing is mocked and discouraged, but Victor isn’t shy about telling the reader/Walton repeatedly how dearly he loves his dear friend Henry and his dear childhood friend Elizabeth and how wretched he is without them. His monster is equally verbose is recounting his wretchedness. Both of them go into detail about how pitiable they are, Victor suffering from mental breakdowns and the deaths of his closest friends and family and the monster lamenting what an outcast he is. While Frankenstein (2025) suggests that Victor is the asshole playing the victim, both of them put on quite the pity party for themselves in the book. Walton himself also tells his sister repeatedly how much he pities Victor and wants to help him. The book ends with Victor dying and the monster proclaiming he will burn himself to death on a pyre. It’s such a bleak book with such a bleak ending it’s laughable.
Perhaps its flaws are why Frankenstein has been adapted so many times and in so many different ways. When I think of “Frankenstein,” I think of the image of Victor screaming with maniacal enthusiasm, “It’s alive!” something I can’t imagine the Victor in the book ever doing. Mary Shelley never even says that electricity resurrected the monster, but that’s primarily how adaptations portray it. To name some other changes adaptations have made
Frankenstein is a mad scientist and the bad guy.
The monster is a mindless beast and the bad guy.
Frankenstein actually creates a bride for the monster.
The monster falls in love with Elizabeth.
Robert Walton is discarded as a narrator.
The monster is called Frankenstein.
It’s as if everyone who made an adaptation of Frankenstein saw the seed of a great idea but poorly executed and proceeded to bring what they saw to light. It’s kind of amazing how many different great ideas people imagined from the same source material.
I reread Eragon by Christopher Paolini (for at least the third time since it was release in 2002) in preparation to read the latest novel related to the Inheritance Cycle Murtagh. Reading it more than 20 years later, the writing has qualities that feel rushed and amateurish. Dialogue and actions for multiple characters are sometimes crammed into single paragraphs for example. A lot of traveling, training, and other things can happen in a few paragraphs. Scenes can end and focus can change quite abruptly as well.
I don’t remember watching the Eragon movie multiple times, but for some reason, reading this book reminded me so much of it. Perhaps that’s only because of my ruthless mocking and criticism of it. I distinctly remember my brother screaming, “Murtagh, I’m on fire!” in response to a prison scene where a flaming Urgal (or was it just a person?) smashed through a flimsy wooden jail that was somehow sturdy enough to imprison Murtagh. I also remember how Saphira flew away as a baby and returned as a full grown dragon capable of fluent telepathic speech.
I suppose I don’t blame the movie’s creators for not emphasizing the injury Durza gives the protagonist Eragon at the end. This injury serves as a major obstacle for Eragon in the sequel Eldest, but Eragon does end rather abruptly, placing more emphasis on a memory/nightmare montage Eragon has than his grievous injury. Eragon doesn’t even see the end of the last battle.
Still, they screwed themselves, dooming the Eldest movie to never be created. Although, an Eragon TV series is in development for Disney+ now. We’ll see if it actually manifests (which would be neat), but that’s another reason to reread the Inheritance Cycle.
Following how much I liked Pride and Prejudice, I listened to Who Was Jane Austen? Sorting Fact from Fiction, a series of essays written and narrated by Stephanie Insley Hershinow.
What I found most interesting was that Pride and Prejudice may have originally been written as an epistolary, a series of letters exchanged between characters. I’d never heard the term before. This theory makes a lot of sense considering how much of Pride and Prejudice focuses on reading and writing letters. Epistolary novels were common at the time, Frankenstein and Dracula being late examples, but when I think about the concept of them now, they seem much more rare and experimental. House of Leaves actually fits the extended definition of an epistolary: collections of any type of documents. Perhaps the letters, in-depth movie analyses, lists, and editor footnotes that compose House of Leaves aren’t so experimental after all, although people in the 18th century would probably shocked by the bizarre formatting and content.
Jane Austen was among authors who moved away from the epistolary format at the start of the 18th century. Perhaps she could be considered an experimental writer!
Shipwreck: How a Captain, Company, and Culture Sank the SS El Faro features re-enactments of the crew transcript from the ship SS El Faro’s final hours alongside the narrator Maeve McGoran’s investigation and commentary on what lead to the ship’s demise. Factors such as the crew’s inability to question their captain due to the ship’s culture, pressure from the company to deliver supplies on time, and inaccurate weather information resulted in the captain and crew steering the ship directly into a hurricane with confidence that they were avoiding it. All 33 crew members died. Only one body was found briefly before the Coast Guard abandoned it due to its state of decay and the need to seek survivors at the time. Even knowing the outcome from the beginning, this audiobook was deeply disturbing to listen to. It seems like required listening for any ship captain, but the narrator claims nothing has changed about maritime culture since the incident occurred.
As a fan of Deadliest Catch, I’d like to think my favorite ship captains would never take the risks or have the ego the captain of the El Faro did. Enough ships have sunk and lost crew members been commemorated in the course of the series’ twenty seasons that I’d hope everyone would be cautious… but then, I remember all the risks they have taken. Captain Phil Harris threw a blood clot and later had a stroke while confidently captaining his ship. Captain Sig Hansen has operated his ship through numerous heart attack-like symptoms and complications, including while delirious. Captain Keith Colburn has also captained his ship through heart attack- and stroke-like symptoms. I guess the best I can hope for is that they remain reasonable enough to not steer their ships into hurricanes or that their crew members are headstrong enough to reason with their captains’ egos when necessary.