Full Moon Rising by Keri Arthur (abridged)

Narrated by Tamara Lovatt-Smith

I’ve been curious about abridged audiobooks. I haven’t listened to many. Apart from this one, there have been three and they were all Georgette Heyer abridgments narrated by Richard Armitage so I don’t need to tell anyone what the attraction was – they worked for me. I haven’t read those books in their unabridged format so I didn’t know what was missing and I didn’t notice any obvious gaps (although I’m told that the longer versions are better. Then again: no Richard Armitage. Decisions, decisions).

I’ve wondered from time to time who decides what is left out and how those decisions are made. (I cannot for the life of me imagine what the abridged version of Outlander would be like when around 33 hours of listening has been distilled to around 6. What’s left?) Anyway, I digress. When I was offered a review copy of Full Moon Rising but was told the only version available was the abridged one, I thought, “what the heck”. I’ve always wanted to try the series and I’ve heard many good things about it.

Pro-tip: I don’t think abridgments work that well for Urban Fantasy.

I’m going to call most of my problems with the story a result of the abridgment. I haven’t read the full book so I don’t know for sure what’s in it, but I feel certain it likely contained much better world building than what I heard. There were odd jumps in plot which had no explanation. The story seemed kind of… choppy. All things which can be explained by culling a book to about half its original length. Something was definitely missing in the translation.

Riley Jensen works for the Directorate of Other Races in Melbourne. She is a rare half werewolf, half vampire. Her twin brother, Rhoan, is a Guardian (kind of like a policeman with judge and jury powers) and the Directorate are actively trying to recruit Riley to do the same. Rhoan goes missing and the story describes Riley’s efforts to find him and then uncover the reasons behind it. It is not a romance but I understand that the series has a romance in it over the entire arc.

The book was written by an Australian and is set in Australia so I was very pleased to see it had an Australian narrator. Unfortunately, her Aussie accent wasn’t enough to make the narration a win. There were only subtle differences between male and female characters, with the main difference being the broadness of the Australian accent.  At times, I couldn’t tell if it was Riley speaking or Quinn or Talon or someone else.

Ms. Lovatt-Smith spoke quickly and occasionally her words ran over themselves and, more times than not, “wolf” sounded like “woof”.  As the story progressed, I felt that the narration improved and Ms. Lovatt-Smith got more of a handle on the Riley Jensen character. I have no way of knowing of course, whether or not she read the full story first. I have it in my head that someone who knew the full story but was delivering the shortened version would somehow be able to convey, by tone and characterisation, some of the things which were missing. But I may be way off base with that.

I will say the sex scenes (and there were plenty of them) were well done, particularly the ones involving Riley and Quinn. I thought Ms. Lovatt-Smith captured an emotional resonance there that wasn’t present with Riley’s other sexual partners. And that brings me to sex.

I was uncomfortable with the sexual politics in Full Moon Rising. Werewolves are caught up in moon fever every full moon and they need to have lots and lots of sex. That’s fine. There was no slut shaming. That was great. The problem? There was non-consensual sex (i.e. rape) (and more than once) in the book and, in addition, Riley was also asked to act as bait (knowing this would mean she would have to have sex with someone not of her choosing for her job). It was presented as no big deal since she’d be up for screwing anything that moved anyway during a full moon. While it was ultimately clear that Riley was uncomfortable with both types of sex, she didn’t seem to suffer any (or much) trauma from it (the worst was the “bait sex” not the rape) and her boss (who directed her to act as bait) didn’t see it as a big deal either. Perhaps with more detailed world building this would have been less of a problem… but, probably not.

Toward the end of the book there were two or three glaring plot holes but I can’t go into them without giving away spoilers. I can’t be sure, but my impression is that this would be the case in the full version also.

There was almost non-stop action and sex  – I think, again, that is a product of the abridgment. I suspect the full version doesn’t come across as so over-the-top. As there was no downtime, it did seem like Riley was being attacked, abducted, or screwed every other page.

It’s difficult for me to recommend this version. And frankly, I can’t be confident that the story issues were all due to the abridgment (although I feel this is likely). Simply put, Book 1 in a multi-book series (particularly in the Urban Fantasy genre which requires a lot of world building) isn’t a good candidate for an abridged audiobook.

Kaetrin

Narration:  C

Book Content:  C-  (please note this is the rating for the abridged content)

Steam Factor:  Glad I had my earbuds in

Violence:  Fighting/Escalated Fighting

Genre:  Urban Fantasy

Publisher:  Random House Audio

Editor’s Note: Books on Tape published an unabridged version of Full Moon Rising narrated by Justine Eyre.

Full Moon Rising was provided to AudioGals for review by Random House Audio.