She fails miserably to inject personality or different 'voices' into any of the characters which I would expect a professional reader to do, and the whole delivery detracts from this excellent novel. She is unable to pronounce much of the French that Julian May uses and even many an English word like 'epoch' elludes her too. So why only four stars? The narrator is quite utterly the wrong one - very poor and it is only a sign of the story's strength that her errors and flat voice can be ignored. It is a sci-fi/fantasy classic in every sense of the word and is highly recommended to everyone who likes either genre. This is one of those books that until now was curiously and scandalously absent from the Audible library. This Science Fantasy classic deserves better! I hope these shortcomings will be addressed if and when the remaining books are published in audiobook format - surely very soon. In addition, I am no language expert, but the narrator's pronunciation of some of the French words is poor and in general her reading of the book is just a bit flat and fails to capture the magic and wonderment of life in the Pliocene Epoch that Julian May is trying to portray. In particular, it is often hard to tell which character is speaking as the narrator's voice sounds very similar for each one, which is a huge shame as all of the characters in the book are expertly depicted by Julian May in such depth that you can feel yourself becoming drawn into their world. The only thing that lets the book down, hence only 4 stars, is the narrator who, for me, fails to bring the characters to life. As you would expect, the audiobook itself follows the book to the letter and I felt that same familiar thrill of being transported back in time to the Pliocene era, with all its many wonders, that I felt upon first reading the book back in the 1980s. Now that the first book in the series, The Many-Colored Land, has been published, I hope it will not be too long before the rest are made available. As a huge fan of Julian May and in particular her Saga of the Pliocene Exile series of books, I have been searching in vain for the books in audiobook format for a long time and so was delighted when I saw that this criminal omission had finally been addressed.
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