Winter World
Series: The Long Winter, Book 1
By: A. G. Riddle / Narrated By: Edoardo Ballerini, Amanda Leigh Cobb
Length: 11 hrs and 4 mins
Good… until it got all emotional and fluffy…
And as a reader of Regency romances and women’s literature, I’m probably the laaaast person who you might think would be griping about emotions and fluff and such all, right?
Well, it’s like this, see… The book opens with Emma as this space station geneticist extraordinaire, survivor, would-be savior, thinks on her feet, all sorts of stuff, right? I mean, she discovers that The Long Winter the Earth is experiencing might have something to do with this UFO-type thingamajig she photographs (And what a geneticist is doing out in space taking pics is never quite fully explained, or I missed it cuz said explanation went by so fast…). But what I’m saying is that the woman has guts, stamina, and most importantly a will of her own. Take note of that as I’ll come back to it after James.
Now James is obviously the Hero of the book, with Emma as the female sidekick-with-brains. James is serving time in a prison on Earth, and we don’t hear what his crime was until the very end. But after things go desperately awry (the Earth is after all in chaos, something is blocking the Sun’s rays/usurping rays, people are dying, countries are entering into weird unions with other countries for survival, it’s just cold cold cold, and everybody who’s not dying is wigging out about dying), James becomes a free man and is slated to go into space with a handpicked group of others to face the thingamajig, and that’s where our saga in space starts.
Cuz Winter World isn’t much about life on Earth with a perpetual and deepening freeze, it’s about a brief stint on Earth so that we might see how Emma is coping with low bone density due to her time in space, even more about some struggles and warfare in space, and even MORE about Emma turning into a mushy wet noodle when James is around. Uhm, excuse me—no, she’s more a mush pie when he’s NOT around (Where is he? I can’t see him? Is he safe? Oh how will I live without him? And such all).
So basically, AG Riddle gave us a love space opera of sorts, aside from some happy pappy relationship dealings on earth, and Emma’s aforementioned bone density woes. I was really hoping that, sure we gotta go into space, but there’d be plenty of frozen apocalyptic wasteland stuff going on that people were going to bravely traverse and deal with. So, like, nope.
If that’s what you’re looking for, move on my friend. The writing is good, that’s not the problem, and there’s only as much science as the ordinary layman can handle (Meeee! I’m TOTally ordinary!). The concepts didn’t zoom over my head, and there was a bit of a: Whazzgoin’ on? as far as what crime James actually committed; so there was at least that tension. That said, however, there was faaaaar more of Emma saying she’d do whatever it takes to be with James, live together, die together. All quite heroic and all that, but desperately ho-hum when one waded all the way through.
I will indeed eVENtually get to the second in the series, it was written well-enough for that. It’s just that I’ll be taking my time, especially as the book ends on a hammy note. But really, I’d probably be listening more for the sublime Edoardo Ballerini and his amazing talent for voices/accents. Amanda Leigh Cobb did very, very well also, but…
Mr. Ballerini, I bow to you! And yes, eVENtually as I said, I’ll get around to listening to your work on the next book. Thank you, sir, for completely saving this audiobook as a listening experience for me!
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