EVERLASTING

Xanthe Elbrick does an admirable job with Woodiwiss's final romance novel. Her voicing of heroine Abrielle is as crisp and sweet as Abrielle herself. Elbrick’s bright British voice is well suited to the eleventh-century setting, and her treatment of the sometimes heavy-handed prose is tender enough to make the excessive summary of action seem just as engaging as the dialogue. Elbrick's only real weakness in this recording is her voicing of the male characters, especially that of the hero, Raven Seabern. Elbrick pulls off a decent Scots accent, but her performance is almost vaudevillian in its puffed-up exaggeration of the sound of a male voice. Despite the shortcomings of both prose and narrator, this volume is indeed satisfying (if a little predictable) to fans of the genre. A.H.A. 2008 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine [Published: JUN/ JUL 08]