It seems like, possibly, and attempt to 'lighten the mood', although I can't tell for sure because it is so strangely delivered. There is also a tremendous amount of strange, seemingly unnecessary inflection going on throughout the reading.

In other words, virtually every line is delivered in a condescending tone.

Here are a few of the highlights: Most of the time, during dialogue, every character sounds like some snotty stuck-up rich-kid from the 'right side of town' talking down to one of the 'average folk'. He gets the tone of the book entirely wrong in nearly too many ways to explain. Wow, for the first time ever I've found a reader that I actually hate. I would suggest newcomers read the book rather than listening. Bottom line here is that you really have to be a former fan of the Shannara series to deal with the Scott Brick audio book format. Luckily for this novel, all of the main characters are men, so at least he has that going for him. I'm sorry to be ragging on him this much, but it was bad! I wish that they had used multiple voices, like the Phillip Pullman series (excellent excellent excellent!) to narrate. The narrative is enough to let me know that something important is happening, I don't need him raising his voice and acting like a bad rendition of shakespearian play to tell me this. I am sad to see that many of the unabridged versions are read by Brick because I really want to listen to them, but I'm not sure I can stomach any more of his nauseating accents and unnecessary inflections. The characters change and the narratives evolve and you grow attached to the story line.

It is interesting how many parallels there are between the books, but it was meant to be the first of a long series of stories. I also am a major fan of LOTR, and I didn't notice how similar the stories were when I was younger. I loved the series and have been reading the books faithfully starting from when I was a young girl. I can't tell how many times I was forced to rewind and listen again because suddenly something of actual interest was happening, but I didn't know how we got there. I couldn't deal with it and often found myself ignoring the story altogether. My biggest annoyance was the constant overly dramatic/snotty inflections that Scott Brick would put into each sentance, each word.

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