About

Hello and thanks for stopping by. My name is Kelli and I am the Oddiophile. I started this review blog so I could chat about the audiobooks I listen to and hopefully engage in a dialogue with visitors. If you need some background on my listening preferences in order to decide if my reviews might reflect your listening tastes:

I listen almost exclusively to fiction titles. I listen to a lot of Urban Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Young Adult, Romance, Fantasy, and Mystery/Thriller. I’ve never cultivated a taste for very dramatic narrators and tend to avoid full-cast productions for that reason. I’ll forgive a lot of sins for a narrator with a lovely voice.

Some of my favorite audiobooks: Patricia Briggs – both the Mercy Thompson and Alpha & Omega series, Karin Slaughter’s Grant County and Will Trent series, Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan series, Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series, Nalini Singh’s Psy/Changeling audiobooks, Jennifer Estep’s Elemental Assassin series, David Weber’s Honor Harrington audiobooks, Any of C.E. Murphy’s audiobooks, Dana Stabenow’s Kate Shugak series… and a lot more.

Review Policy Statement:

The vast majority of audiobooks reviewed on this site were purchased by me, as my Audible.com account can attest to. I only listen to audiobooks that interest me and will quit listening if I don’t like it. Because of that I rarely give an audiobook an F grade. If an audiobook reviewed on this blog was received free-of-charge, either from a publisher or in a giveaway, that will be clearly noted in the review. I do not receive compensation for reviewing an audiobook and every review on this site reflects my honest opinion and rating, whether positive or negative.

If you would like to contact me, feel free to use the Contact Us widget on the top left of the page or drop me an e-mail using this link: Oddiophile

How I Grade:

In the sense that I do not accept compensation for a review and that it reflects my true opinion about an audiobook, I consider my reviews “objective.” Realistically I’m not truly offering an objective review because I’m not grading strictly on criteria that are black and white (seriously, who wants to read a review that discusses nothing but spelling, sentence construction, and discontinuities in the story?) We all bring our own set of experiences and individual tastes to how we perceive what we read. My reviews are also informed by what my reading history provides me as comparison points for how a book stacks up overall and for how it meets my expectations within what I’ve read in a specific genre.

I tend to use the same scale Goodreads does but I’ve converted it to letter grades. Here’s a breakdown of how I translate the two. To answer the obvious question before we even begin – “I Hate It” isn’t an “F” because if it’s that bad I’m not going to finish listening and so won’t review it. Life’s too short for bad books.

Overall Scoring:

D = Didn’t Like It

C = It Was OK

C+/B = Liked It

B+/A- = Really Liked it

A = It Was Amazing

In terms of narration:

F: I don’t think I’ve encountered one but it would probably be comprised of horrible accents, no character differentiation, mispronounced words, errors in what is spoken vs. what is written, an irritating narrator’s voice or multiple annoying character voices (that aren’t defined as such in the text), and no emotion in delivery

D: Similar to above but slightly better differentiation and some emotion. This can also be the grade I select if the narration is an overall C but there is one big narration problem such as giving the bad guy an evil voice when his identity is not supposed to be revealed until the surprise ending or if you can hear a lot of breathing during narrative portions and not as part of a character’s attributes

C: Occasional problems determining who is speaking, some issues with the narrator’s interpretation vs. what is given in the text (e.g. “he said angrily” but not sounding particularly angry in tone), accents close but not perfect, production issues

B: The narrator’s voice appeals to me; character voices clearly differentiated; accents good; delivery matches what’s indicated in the text; can’t hear narrator breathing or making extraneous noises; few, if any, sound issues (e.g. you can tell where retakes were inserted because the volume abruptly changes), and generally I feel like I am discovering the story at the same time as the narrator (i.e. they deliver “in the moment” narration)

A: I like/love the narrator’s voice, their delivery is faithful to the text, and there is absolutely nothing in their performance that pulls me out of the story: all accents are perfect, I hear male characters as such and female characters sound like women, their portrayal of emotional scenes evokes a matching emotion from me and is never over-done, a complete feeling of real-time discovery as I listen to the story, and no production issues to speak of.