So, this was clearly not a book for me. I did like the post-apocalyptic setting, but that was it. We get what is basically insta lust and then the main character just keeps thinking about her crush. Even to the point that the story takes a back seat.

Now this calms a bit later, but then the next problem for me was that there was this plan that I failed to understand the reasoning behind. And while they were following that plan, they found out by coincidence the solution to the whole conflict...

Really made me feel the story was just a background for the relationship. Which could have been fine if the relationship was well written.

I was not interested enough in the setting to pick up the next book. ( )

This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: probably not.

Audio Narration
The narrator is Annette Romano. She was ok. I had complaints, but I think some of them may be more due to the text than the narrator. For example, the narration often sounded robotic to me, not due to lack of emotion in the reading, but just because of the cadence of how the words were said. I think a lot of that was caused by a serious underuse of contractions in the writing, especially in the dialogue. The tone was a little over-dramatic for me, especially when the main character started expressing some of her many, many, many, many lustful longings.

The narrator differentiated between character voices pretty well, but I did have some trouble telling the difference between the main character’s internal thoughts and spoken dialogue. It was usually clear enough after the fact though that something must have been an internal thought when nobody reacted to her wildly inappropriate words.

Story
This is fantasy I guess, although there aren’t many fantasy elements in it. The story focuses on a young woman named Compass Rose who has an unerring ability to tell what direction things are in, making her very useful in her role as a navigator on a submarine. That was probably the most magical aspect of the story. The story is set in some sort of post-apocalyptic version of our world in which the land is uninhabitable and everybody lives on various ships (water ships, not spaceships) or stations. Pirates, and to a lesser extent mercenaries, are a problem. Compass Rose is asked by her captain to take a secret mission working for a mercenary captain to gain information about pirate movements for the Fleet she serves.

Rose is a little nuts. She’s completely driven by her libido. Way too much of the story focused on Rose lusting after people and being overwhelmed by their presence and their smell and their eyes and their breath and… you got the idea. Her judgment is perpetually clouded. It just came across as silly to me and there were lots of eye rolls while I listened. If all of that had been taken out, this probably would have been a novella-length story. And I probably would have liked it a lot more.

Because aside from those parts, I kind of enjoyed the story, when Rose wasn’t around the main object of her obsessive desires and was just acting like a normal person with a job to do. I’m not sure everything made sense exactly, but I tend to notice that less with audiobooks anyway and I don’t trust my judgement that I haven’t missed details I would have caught better in print. I found myself listening surprisingly intently during some of the action sequences, which is unusual for me. Normally, when listening to an audiobook, the action scenes tend to lose my attention. And it was kind of an interesting setting. Rose annoyed the heck out of me for all the aforementioned reasons, but the other characters were ok. A little over-the-top and/or cliché, maybe, but likeable. Still, even though there were things to like, I doubt I’ll ever want to read more. ( )