A Stitch in Time by Kelley Armstrong

A Stitch in Time by Kelley Armstrong

Narrated by Samantha Brentmoor

I was so excited when I read the blurb for A Stitch in Time. A time-slip SFF where a Canadian woman from the present-day travels back and forth from Thorne Manor in Yorkshire, to Victorian England? Yes!! There are ghosts and a mystery and a romance. Sign me up!

Bronwyn Dale lives in Toronto but travels to Yorkshire when she inherits Thorne Manor from her aunt. As a child, she would stay for the summer at Thorne Manor with her aunt and uncle, sometimes with her parents, sometimes not. At Thorne Manor she crossed back in time and met William Thorne, a child the same age as she but who lived 170 years earlier. She could only go backwards in time from the bedroom they shared (albeit in different time periods) but going forwards to the present could happen anywhere. Of the pair, only she could travel through time.

William and Bronwyn became fast friends and had lots of fun adventures; Bronwyn’s family thought she had an imaginary friend and/or was spending time with a village boy. There was then a gap in her visits of a number of years when Bronwyn’s parents divorced but she returned to Thorne Manor when she and William were both 15 and then their relationship turned romantic, and they shared a few kisses and held hands and felt all the feelings teenagers feel. But Bronwyn left abruptly around the time her uncle died tragically, having run screaming from the house babbling about a ghost. When Bronwyn spoke in the hospital about William, she was committed to a psychiatric institution for treatment. Bronwyn never returned – until now.

The same time travel alchemy is at work even 23 years later and Bronwyn finds herself once again slipping back and spending time with William. Initially he’s upset and hurt by her abrupt departure the last time, but they work past it fairly quickly and then their interactions take a decidedly more adult bent.

In the present, Bronwyn encounters a number of ghosts in and around Thorne Manor and begins to unravel a mystery about missing women and violent death, with the assistance of the caretaker’s wife who is an expert in folklore and who has an interest in the supernatural.

Exactly what that has to do with William is unclear for much of the book – but we listeners know there must be a connection. Is William who Bronwyn think he is or does he hide a dark side? From where does the threat come? And, even if William is the hero of Bronwyn’s dreams, can they find a way to be together and have a HEA? (No. I’m not going to tell you what happens.)

I appreciated the representation of Del, the caretaker at Thorne Manor, a trans man. His gender is mentioned in the book early on as Bronwyn has a discussion with him about pronouns, but thereafter he is just himself doing caretaker things and being the husband of his wife. On one view, perhaps it could be said that the author could have cast a cis-gender man to be Del and it wouldn’t have made any difference but I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. Rather, why not make Del’s character trans? Trans characters deserve to appear in stories just because. More of this please.

The narration by Samantha Brentmoor was a bit disappointing, particularly in the first half of the book, though it did improve later (or I got used to it – one of those). The story is told from Bronwyn’s first-person perspective and Ms. Brentmoor’s natural American accent works well here. However, the various English accents required, particularly the Yorkshire accent, were not anywhere near as authentic or successful for me. Ms. Brentmoor did better with William’s voice. It was pleasingly deeper in tone and William’s upper crust English accent was less cringeworthy. In fact, over the course of the book, William’s accent improved markedly from the earlier sections. But it often happened that I’d settle into a scene which was not too bad accent-wise and then bam! there’d be something which made me wince. Perhaps US/Canadian listeners won’t notice this as much as I did though.

In addition to the issues I had with the accents of the English cast, there were numerous mispronunciations, some examples of which include “abulations” instead of ablutions, “friviolities” rather than frivolities. I did a bit of wincing about those as well.

There were also some, thankfully less frequent, instances where a pause was used in the wrong place or the wrong tone was used, which changed the context of the sentence from what was intended.

Fortunately, all these issues tailed off in the latter half of the book.

In the beginning, I found myself listening to the story in bursts, interrupting it with podcasts and other listening, especially for the first 50% of the book. I could tell that the story was really good but I had to work a bit to get over the issues I had with the narration.

However, after about the halfway point, the story caught me up enough to overcome my ambivalence about the narration and I do think Ms. Brentmoor’s performance improved as well. Or, at least, it bothered me a lot less and resulted in a better grade for the narration than I was thinking earlier would be the case.

There were parts of A Stitch in Time which were genuinely creepy and tense and I did not guess what the eventual outcome would be. (I just trusted the author wouldn’t let me down!) There was some very clever use of subtext and setting which led to all sorts of wild speculations and worry on my part (as I’m pretty sure I was supposed to).

The very end of the book felt a little rushed, with some parts of the plot being resolved with a bit of magical hand-waving. There was something right at the end (which I can’t talk about because spoilers) that I would have liked more information about but for the most part, the story itself hooked me.

As the story progressed there were fewer and fewer sections with dialogue which required a Yorkshire accent and that probably helped with my enjoyment of the narration. Listeners unfamiliar with that specific accent will probably struggle a lot less than I did. Despite my early grumbling about the narrative performance, the story itself was more than enough to put the experience firmly in the win column.

Kaetrin


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6 thoughts on “A Stitch in Time by Kelley Armstrong

  1. I tried this book a few weeks ago but couldn’t handle the narrator. I was disappointed because it seemed like a good story. I loved the trans character as my husband is trans so I like to see the inclusion in fiction.

    Unfortunately, the narration was the breaking point for me.

      1. No, for me it was the actual voice. I can live with bad accents unless their terrible, but vocal quality is something else again.

  2. Found this when I searched for is it just me on the narrator.

    It doesn’t help that my family live in North Yorkshire so the narrator picking something that sounded like a cross between Cornish and Scottish to not represent the yorkshire dialect was very irritating but amazingly, not the breaking point for me. The breaking point was the lack of prep by the narrator. It began with her pronouncing an aga cooker as “The A.G.A” and continued through a lot of weirdly inappropriate timing, tonality, weird pauses and fake tension accompanied by many, many misprounciations of pretty ordinary words. Ablutions, I mean what’s the problem? Abu-lu-t-ions, nope!

    1. Thank you Linzi – it’s good to know my criticism regarding the Yorkshire accent was accurate! :)

      I completely agree with you about “abulutions” and I noticed the aga too. I don’t think she’s familiar with them at all and, to be fair to her on this one thing, when I checked the text it was not written “aga” but AGA which makes her use of the letters as an acronym perhaps understandable (but no less wrong). It did get better as the book progressed but I guess you didn’t make it that far?

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