Audiobook Review: Claimings, Tails, and Other Alien Artifacts (Claimings #1) by Lyn Gala

Liam loves his life as a linguist and trader on the Rownt homeworld, but he has ignored his heart and sexual needs for years. He won't risk letting anyone come too close because he won't risk letting anyone see his deeply submissive nature. For him, submission comes with pain. Life burned that lesson into his soul from a young age. This fear keeps him from noticing that the Rownt trader Ondry cares for him.

Ondry may not understand humans, but he recognizes a wounded soul, and his need to protect Liam is quickly outpacing his common sense. They may have laws, culture, and incompatible genitalia in their way, but Ondry knows that he can find a way to overcome all that if he can just overcome the ghosts of Liam's past. Only then can he take possession of a man he has grown to love.

Listening Length: 6 hours and 57 minutes
Narrator: John Solo

Full disclaimer here. This series is in my top 5… or 3. That’s a tough list to be on, but either way Lyn Gala’s Claimings is on it! So this review will not discuss the story content, otherwise the review would just be ridiculous ravings of an over excited unicorn.

This is just a review on the narration and honestly, John Solo had a big task ahead of him. When you risk listening to a favourite story in someone else’s voice you have to agree, accept and in the case of an all time favourite, love their take on the character. I’ve obviously already got ideas of what these men sound like in my head, adding a real voice to that is very dangerous…..

Did he live up to the challenge? Yes absolutely! But…. there was this one niggle…. i’ll get to that.

John Solo captured my attention from the moment he spoke, I was back to finding excuses to clean the house or drive around so I could have his narration in my ears. His voice acting is spot on, the fear, anger, lust and uncertainty in Liam’s voice was perfect. The slight accent change for Ondry was… well let's face it sexy as hell!! It was strong, smooth and calm, just how I always picture Ondry. I smashed through this audiobook and cannot wait to hear John’s take on the next few books in the series.

‘So get to the point, what was this niggle?’ you might ask. Well this book revolves around Liam learning the language and some communication barriers between Liam and Ondry, therefore John uses that stilted punctuation of each word during certain dialogue. This actually worked well for the most part, however I found it was used far too much for Ondry’s voice. This book is written with the characters speaking Rownt, therefore Liam is the character new to the language and Ondry is the native speaker. However Ondry’s voice had so many punctuated words and not nearly enough flow, which really didn’t make sense to the character and more than that became really very annoying. I almost wanted to put the audiobook on 1.5x speed to make his sentence flow seem more natural. I guess some people would put it down to his accent but that stilted speaking wasn’t always present, just present too often.

I’m really hoping the next audiobook will have improved on this as Liam and Ondry become more accustomed to each other. If that’s the case I’ll completely take back my comment as it shows amazing thought and detail from John to make their communication issues more realistic. But if Ondry still speaks like someone who doesn’t know his own language I will probably come back looking something like this...

Anyway, despite my little hiccup which took up way too much time in the review, it really was amazing!

A review copy was provided in exchange for an honest opinion.