Audiobook Mini-Review – I Am Number Four

I Am Number Four by Pittacus Lore (11H 25M)

The book:

The performance:

I’ve had this entire series on my TBR for a long, long time. I saw the movie when it first came out, and despite how most of the world felt about it, I  liked it. I was quite bummed when the studio decided not to do any of the sequels.

The book was a lot different. Better in some ways, not so great in others. Overall, I found it to be a little more juvenile than I was hoping for. A lot of the dialogue, and the way the relationship between Sarah and John played out, all seemed to be the way a pre-teen would imagine it all to go in his fantasies. I’ve never met a girl who giggled and hit playfully as much as Sarah did in this book.

None of the characters were very real to me. To be fair, a lot of the characters are aliens, but even the human characters were a little cardboard.

I found the performance to be a little lacking. Neil Kaplan has a decent voice, and he does male characters very, very well. Each character had a completely different voice. If I didn’t know any better, I would have thought there was more than one voice actor working on this one. Though his voice for Sam was straight out of a box of cliches. “Now with 30% more cheese!”

Female characters, however, were not done so well. Each female line of dialogue sounded the same. Same voice (despite being different characters) and the same inflection. Whether it was Sarah professing her love or Six shouting for everyone to run, it came out bubbly and kind of vapid. And the voice Kaplan uses is the kind you’d expect a comedian to use when making fun of something his girlfriend said.

But, story is king, and this story is good. The action is great, the universe is expansive, the legends and myths hinted at are deep-seeded, and the potential for the rest of the series is too good to not continue. In fact, as I write this post, I’m about halfway through The Power of Six.