I received this book for free from Provided for review through Audiobook Blast/Boom in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Souls of the Never by CJ Rutherford Narrator: Katie Welburn
Series: Tales of the Neverwar, #1
Published by CJ Rutherford on September 8th 2014
Length: 5 hrs and 38 mins
Genres: Epic, Fantasy, Fantasy & Magic, Time Travel
Pages: 238
Format: Audiobook
Source: Provided for review through Audiobook Blast/Boom
Goodreads
Katheryne thinks she's just a normal 20-year-old, until her dreams descend into terror and pain.
At the edge of the universe, an ancient evil awakens. It wants our world; and she is the gateway.
As the dreams become reality, Katheryne is pitched into a battle that has raged for thousands of years. The fate of all reality rests in her hands, but the enemy has discovered her.
Can Derren, an elite warrior from another time and space, find her in time to save her?This is Book One in Tales of the Neverwar. An epic adventure through time, space and alternate realities. Witness epic dragon battles in this coming of age fantasy adventure series. Suitable for the Young Adult audience. I would highly recommend reading the free short prequel, Origins of the Never. It's set thousands of years before events in this book, and will provide an insight into some of the characters you meet.
Julie’s Review:
After perusing all the other reviews, I seriously feel like I missed something.
Honestly, I can’t say if the book itself has problems because it is the audiobook that gave me trouble. The narrator, well, sounds like a little girl. A soft little girl voice that no matter how high I turned up the volume, it was still just a little high-pitched girl voice. And that made it SO HARD for me to follow along. I kept losing interest. I kept backing it up. I gave up backing it up after a while and just kept listening to get through the story. A sample isn’t enough to really get a feel for the narrator, but when after an hour of listening you realize you lost your attention somewhere and couldn’t figure out where, there’s a problem.
But I feel like I must have missed a lot because the amazing story that the other reviewers are touting just wasn’t there for me. This book even won an award! So is it me? It might be me.
Anyway, the general gist of the story was creative. I really liked the different dimensions and the tech talk that made me remember some episodes of The Fringe. See? This book should have been totally right up my alley. I love alternate dimensions and finding other selves and even possible time travel stories. This book had all the elements of a great story for me but didn’t deliver. And I hate to think the audio narrator ruined the book for me. But I really believe that is what happened unless the book itself was so disjointed that reading it would have lost me as well. I really can’t say. For a book that is only about 5 hours long, I sure felt like it took longer with all the backing up to try to figure out double you tee eff was going on.
It is so hard to believe a love story when it sounds like a child is narrating it. But the love story in this book is epic, two souls searching for each other, dreaming about each other, through multiple dimensions until they finally find each other. EPIC. Well, it should have been anyway.
Another issue I had with the book is the ending. Our awesome heroine plans to save the day by stopping an event in the past to prevent all the horror that happened since. But life doesn’t quite work out that way, does it? All that paradox stuff anyway. I didn’t understand why she was the special snowflake that was even able to go back and try to change something, but the whole way it went down was creep factor major and just didn’t work for me.
So I guess I’ll have to be the black sheep reviewer on this one. Sorrynotsorry.
