Great Story!

This was brilliant! Read on a suggestion from a friend and am delighted. Magic and technology is a great combination! Really enjoyed the characters and their voice acting!

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Superbly read and amazingly written

Some areas were a little hard to follow when there was so much 'summing up' information but the rest was wonderfully written.
The story is written from 2 people's perspective intertwining beautifully. The characters and imagery are thoroughly described and the different voices/accents really help keep the individual characters alive.
i really enjoyed the whole story apart from the 'anti fat' language used occasionally.

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This is definitely NOT suitable for children!!

This has been wrongly described as a children’s book and wrongly categorised. It is an excellent young adult/adult title. It contains descriptions of orgies, graphic murder of children and is very adult in its story line and subject matter. A brilliant book but not suitable for children.

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1 person found this helpful

Fantastic story

Would you listen to Deep Secret again? Why?

One of DWJ'a best - such a credible fantasy with fully developed characters and plot.

Would you listen to another book narrated by Chris Webster and Harriet Carmichael ?

No

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Yes

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A great interpretation of a favourite DWJ story

Any additional comments?

This is one of my favourite DWJ stories. There's a lot going on in it, it is clever, in a subtle way, rather than being in your face. It stretches across worlds with a narrative that unfurls slowly, revealing things as it goes along. One of the best things about DWJ characters is that they are believable... they are not perfect and you like them in spite of or even because of their failings. The central characters, Rupert and Maree are beautifully drawn. I wasn't sure about the performances initially, but they really grew on me. One slight annoyance is that the sound level of Chris Webster's performance varies a bit too much. You can suggest whispering or shouting without doing it. Apart from that, it is a great performance of all the voices and I liked Harriet Carmichael too, although I tend to think Maree's voice is a bit lower than she plays it. I particularly liked that they both seemed to have worked together to make their character voices similar but without overdoing it. This book is like an old friend that is a joy to revisit time after time and I'm pleased that now I can revisit the audio version as well as on the page. Also a relief to get an unabridged version. Whoever thinks that DWJ needs abridging is frankly nuts - she's never wastes a word, so why would you cut them?

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4 people found this helpful

Fabulous!

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Yes, yes and yes - if you enjoy fantasy then I'd be really surprised if you didn't love Diana Wynne Jones. This book is one of her best and one of my absolute favourites - fun the whole way through with a bit of everything thrown in - adventure, science fiction, fantasy, romance, comedy, drama, all given a good stir and well-seasoned with a bit of tongue-in-cheek affection.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Deep Secret?

Good the whole way through - its pretty even - but the fantasy con is perfectly done.

Which scene did you most enjoy?

Don't make me pick - not fair. It's good the whole way through!

If you made a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?

Not sure it would be possible so a tagline would have to be: Forget the film, just read the book!

Any additional comments?

Excellent narration - it can make or break a book, but the two narrators do a terrific job.

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Complicated but terrific book, well narrated.

This isn't the easiest book to get into, but it is very worthwhile persevering with it. What starts off as a rather weird sci-fi sort of narrative rapidly returns to earth for a story full of human interest, characters and situations that are definitely quirky but very absorbing. The readers do it full justice

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A good fantasy with twists.

A good story.
The readers seemed too young and the supposed adult male curiously naive and teenagers in the narrative.
But the story itself seemed good enough to push those annoyances aside.

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Good story but some very badly aged descriptions

The worldbuilsing in this was quite well done. Where in other stories Diana Wynne Jones likes to put the occasional modern bit in her historic magical books, this was the opposite. A book about current times (at least of the 90s) with some magic thrown in. She manages to weave these two worlds together quite well.
Setting it at a con for fantasy book lovers was a clever choice. I think what she tried to do was make a slight parody of a world she probably occasionally visits. Some of the parts work quite well for that. However in the way she describes most female characters it falls quite flat. They are either fat (and often not the brightest besides the main character) or slender and beautiful. In general the way she describes fat people is very in line with the 90s way of dehumanizing them. A parody is only fun if the people it is about can laugh along, which is not always the case here.
Besides that it is a very fun book, the main characters all really have their own personality.
The narrators also did quite well, they coordinated well with each other and gave fun voices to a lot of background characters. The different accents and voices really did help keep them apart.
I do have one thing. I really wish the male narrator would have looked into what a Dutch accent sounds like. Because as a Dutch person I have no idea where he got his inspiration for the Dutch character, but it was not from my country.

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body shaming misogyny fatphobia ahoy

I'm a real fan of Wynne-Jone's other works but she must have been having a real self-hatred episode when she wrote this. A female character is not introduced without first being evaluated for her looks. Fat characters are routinely dehumanised and in one case a main character actually gets up and leaves a room because he cannot abide a fat person sitting next to him.
Don't give this to impressionable young adults, don't read it yourself.

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