PANDORA

After a slow start, narrator Olivia Vinall's pleasing voice makes PANDORA an engaging listening experience. When a sealed box is retrieved from deep below the sea, Dora, an aspiring jewelry designer, opens it and becomes fascinated with the ancient Greek vase within, covered with images from the Pandora myth. Her unscrupulous Uncle Hezekiah's antiquities shop is filled with fakes, so Dora turns to Edward, an antiquities scholar, to verify the authenticity of the vase. What they discover comes at a great cost. Susan Stokes-Chapman's writing works too hard to transform a classic myth into an eighteenth-century mystery, but Vinall stretches her range to encompass the numerous characters and abundance of subplots. She provides a serviceable narration for a novel that never quite lives up to its promise. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine [Published: OCTOBER 2022]