From Publishers Weekly
MacDuffie reads this Southern gothic tale, which King completed upon her friend McDowell's death, with a honeyed Alabama drawl that rapidly grows tiresome. She puts so much effort into each word that the audiobook becomes more a personal performance than a reading of the book. Her voice, by turns exaggerated and grating, spills over the book's words, drenching them in a faux-folksy charm that overwhelms the authors' narrative. MacDuffie is technically accomplished, but her reading is simply too much, taking center stage when it should be content with remaining dutifully in the background. The result is attempted Faulkner or Tennessee Williams, more suitable to the stage than to the reading of a novel.
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From Booklist
Seven-year-old Calley Dakin is thrown into the all-female whirlwind of her mother's family when her father is gruesomely murdered. The Carrolls fancy themselves Alabama aristocracy and scheme amongst themselves as well as with others to grab the wealth that undergirds the pretense. That scheming involves Calley, whose extraordinary ears hear not only the living but also the dead, whom she sometimes sees, too. She doesn't know she's the eye of the family storm, much less who she can trust, as she is carted from home to Grandmother Mamadee's to the Victorian house on the Gulf of Mexico in which she grows up. McDowell, who wrote the stories on which
Beetlejuice and
The Nightmare before Christmas are based, hadn't finished this lightly supernatural confection when he died in 1999. King completes it beautifully as to tone, aura, and flavor, and it's funny and intriguing, magnetically readable. Some may be disappointed, though, that in the end Calley is much less likable (she's a heartless liberal philanthropist) than triumphant.
Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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