To Marry An English Lord by Gail MacColl and Carol McD. Wallace

to marry an english lordNarrated by Kate Reading

To Marry an English Lord is a non-fiction account of American heiresses going to England from about 1860 to 1914 to nab a peer on the marriage mart. The nouveau rich were not accepted by staid New York society, and Bertie, the Prince of Wales, was far more receptive. American girls were vaunted by the Marlborough set and their money propped up Bertie’s excesses. I was hoping for more of a series of real life mini romances, with more information about the matches and what the marriages were like from an emotional perspective, but it was, alas, much drier than that. Maybe my expectations were unrealistic.

To be frank, I think this is a book that would be far better in print. The Goodreads listing talks about photographs and illustrations and of course, we don’t get any of those in the audio format. There are also lists (lists of girls, the names of their parents, who they married) – which are fine in print, you can skim and take it in quite quickly. But it is boring, boring, boring on audio. Really, even the most talented narrator is going to struggle to make that interesting. I found myself fading in and out of the listen, possibly missing some things which were actually fun and interesting as my eyes glazed over with the things which were not.

After I listened to Lord of Scoundrels (which I loved – I gave it an A+), I saw some friends on Twitter complaining about Kate Reading’s over-narration in the Author Letter at the front. I didn’t mention it in my own review because I was far more interested in the story and I didn’t pay the Author Letter much mind. The narration of the story was stellar, but the Author Letter was overdone. So was this book. It’s a non-fiction book but it was read by Ms. Reading as if it were a riveting piece of historical fiction. Which it wasn’t.

Perhaps I’m being unfair – I’ve listened to Grover Gardner narrate both fiction and non-fiction and I actually can’t detect any difference in his performance style across both. (Perhaps it is that Grover Gardner is generally more understated anyway?)

For me, the narration tried too hard to make the story “pop”. I would have much rather listened to a more subtle reading of the text rather than a performance. I don’t think the book called for it.

No doubt the print book is very pretty and the kind of thing one might use as a bit of a reference, but the audio didn’t grab my attention the way I had been hoping. I’ve gone with a C for the grading because I think it was more a failure of the format than anything else which made this experience not all that successful for me.

Kaetrin


Narration: C

Book Content: C

Steam Factor: You can play it out loud.

Violence: N/A

Genre: Non-fiction

Publisher: Tantor Audio

 

To Marry an English Lord was provided to AudioGals by Tantor Audio for a review.

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