Susan Ericksen
Multiple accented characters appear in BONDED IN DEATH, including: Eastern European, Irish, and English. Narrator Susan Ericksen eminently meets her storyteller’s primary accent obligation: to perform these characters as people that do not know they have an accent, even though we do. That is, she plays the person, not the accent. What glues Ericksen’s accented characters to dimensionality, keeping them from slipping off into caricature, is her connection to their emotional purpose. Yes, her accents sound authentic, a must. That said, no matter how believable, it is her prioritizing their words’ emotional consequence that convinces us they actually are where they’re from, but more consequentially, binds us to who they are.
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