ORWELL'S ROSES

Rebecca Solnit is an impressively eclectic historian, thinker, and author, and as an audiobook narrator, she contributes a certain degree of personality and immediacy, as author/narrators do. But for a far-reaching work such as this--built around author George Orwell's planting of a rose garden in 1936 and branching into numerous offshoots, political, literary, and historical--a more steady and skilled voice is required. Solnit's narration style is a reading style, and she has the distracting habit of placing breathy emphasis on the last word of each phrase. When she speeds up, her cadences improve, and hers is not an unpleasant voice, merely one in need of a bit of professional training and direction. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine [Published: DECEMBER 2021]