Love After Love in Around the World in 80 Books

Oct 19, 2020 Beverly rated it really liked it

Shelves: contemporary, caribbean, cross-cultural, family-drama, coming-of-age, nyc, newtome2020, lgbtq, trinidad, friendship

thoughts coming shortly

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Nov 23, 2020 Lindsey Z rated it liked it

2.75 🌟

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Jan 28, 2022 Nina ( picturetalk321 ) rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: europe-uk, author-ofcolour, author-woman, europe, genre-fiction, theme-het, author-hybridnation, a-reviewed, format-audiobook, world-trinidad-tobago

This took me 1 1/2 years to finish and the only reason I finally did was to fulfil a challenge prompt: audiobook narrated by the author. In fact, I rescued this from the DNF pile in order to fill that prompt. And let me tell you: authors are not necessarily the best people to read their stories out loud onto audible.

I don't generally listen to audiobooks. They are too slow for me. I only discovered the speeding-up function on audio last week. Even so, I could not get the audio to be as fast as This took me 1 1/2 years to finish and the only reason I finally did was to fulfil a challenge prompt: audiobook narrated by the author. In fact, I rescued this from the DNF pile in order to fill that prompt. And let me tell you: authors are not necessarily the best people to read their stories out loud onto audible.

I don't generally listen to audiobooks. They are too slow for me. I only discovered the speeding-up function on audio last week. Even so, I could not get the audio to be as fast as my optical reading. And the voice gets distorted when one speeds it up.

Year before last I listened to Thandiwe Newton read Jane Eyre. Newton is a professional actress and listening to her was riveting. Listening to Persaud unfortunately wasn't. The best thing was her Trini accent which brought the language alive for me but unlike a professional actress, Persaud only has a range of three voices: narrator, deep "man" or bossy, and high-pitched babyish. The use of the high-pitched voice for whenever the female narrator and sometimes her son spoke in dialogue was extremely grating to me. There was altogether not enough voice modulation, not enough voice *acting*.

When I went to read some of the book on my kindle, I discovered that dialogue was marked not via speech marks but by being indented and in a different font. Why? This affectation served no purpose as the rest of the novel was not experimental. It just irritated me.

This dragged on for me. Some points just kept repeated over and over. Some points get left hanging. And there is a deus ex machina development that did not work for me. Ultimately, I didn't really care about the characters. The only one who came alive for me now and again was gay Mr Chetan.

This book could also have done with a content warning: character death. Also: one character gets away with murder. But trad publishers never put those in, shame on them.

Sigh. You may like this, many did. It just didn't do it for me and I'm glad it's finally behind me. Redeeming features: I liked being in Trinidad, getting a flavour of life among the Indian diaspora. ...more

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Feb 10, 2022 Julie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

What a lovely book! I enjoyed this deeply felt and raw story of 3 people making there way in the world the best they can through pain, loss, and love. The setting in Trinidad was so interesting and I loved listening to the author read it on #audio . Her voice and accent were gorgeous!

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