EricaO

I made it through four discs then called it quits.

The problem I had was that, to me, this is a mediocre story made worse by the wrong reader.

The book had originally intrigued me for many reasons: It has a slightly magical description, there's a cute little fairy house on the cover, and most-important, it's about sisters. I love stories about sisters. From the first description of them, though, I was put off - the oldest was apparently the most hideous child ever birthed, so ugly that no one in town would even look at her. That seemed weird to me. I don't think I've ever seen a child so homely that I couldn't even look at it. However, her parents loved her ... so, really, why did she even notice at such a young age the actions of the townsfolk? Shouldn't she have been secure in her place in the world because her parents didn't treat her like the ugliest child ever created? Shouldn't it have taken her a whole lot longer to notice that everyone's eyes avoided her? This isn't something she should have picked up on at, what, age three?
But whatever.
Seven years later, her little sister, Rachel, comes along and this second child happens to be the most beautiful girl in town and probably the county. Sadly, a childhood illness strikes her blind and she has no idea she's stunningly lovely or that her sister is hideous.
So we're starting out with a fairy tale and one that never sits well with me - the ugly older sister and the fetching younger one.
Helen, the grotesque child, hates her sister based solely on their outward appearances and takes to emotionally torturing little Rachel. So now we have exterior facade matching interior motivation and the whole story is centered on looks, jealousy, and who can see which truths in which tales.

It's also a broader family story, pulling the past - the story of the manipulative and abusive town founder - toward the present - Helen and Rachel - via the relatives in between such as Helen and Rachel's parents. This is fine, lots of stories do this, not a problem...until other people start getting pulled in and now there are too many stories to keep up with, stories that aren't necessary, stories that could have been told somewhere within the context of the family line, not as break-out stories of their own. This became a huge problem for me when I started to feel manipulated into appreciating the quirkiness of the Roam/Arcadia area; it felt forced, these multiple perspectives of wacky people and their interchanges with other strange folk and so I stopped caring.

I might have trudged through the book, letting it play in the background and not really paying attention, had there been a different reader. However, this reader seemed to be maybe the worst possible choice. She sounded, to me, as if she were reading this story while hiking up a mountain with a group of not-very-bright third-graders. The cadence of her speech was odd, flowing at a conversational pace and then slowing down for SERIOUS ENUNCIATION then she'd start yelling words at random...the speech patterns were similar to Captain Kirk's, actually. None of it made sense, it didn't fit with the story, and it distracted me to no end.

I'm turning this back in today and my ears will thank me for it on my drive home tonight.