Voidborne Review: An Acclaimed Narrator and a Flat Recording

I was not going to review this one. I gave up on it after a few hours and moved on, and a book I did not finish is usually not worth anybody's time to read about.

Then it turned up in Audible's premium collection again, people started asking whether it was any good, and I looked at the rating. It sits at 4.6 on Amazon. That is the same neighborhood as series I have put near the top of my tier scale, and it is the reason this page exists.

So I went back and gave it another two hours to be fair to it. Seven hours of twelve, in total. I was no more interested at the end than I had been at the start.

The opening asks too much

Noah dies, quickly, in a properly LitRPG fashion. I appreciated the speed of it, and getting the origin out of the way is a real virtue.

Then he meets an eldritch void god in the depths of space, mid-meal, eating stars.

It turns out Noah has something grafted to his soul, hidden there specifically so no god could take it, and the god wants it. And Noah, a normal man who has been dead for about a minute, in the presence of a universe-devouring horror, reasons his way to the conclusion that the thing cannot simply be taken from him, and refuses the offer.

The book sells this by suggesting that without a body he cannot feel the physical panic he otherwise would. I did not buy it. I would be fairly rattled meeting an eldritch god either way.

It is a bold move, and it works out, because otherwise there is no book. The god has to negotiate instead, and we watch a dead office worker haggle with a star-eater. He comes out of it reborn in a new world with limited access to some void-flavored abilities, and I was already struggling.

And then nothing much happens

Here is the thing: I was willing to write the opening off. Get the origin done, move on, show me the story.

What follows is a low-level adventuring grind. Noah is level one with basic abilities, doing small quests in a small area. Structurally that is fine, and I understand the author needs to introduce a world and its people. Salvos does something similar in its early hours.

But nothing in it is new, and nothing in it is interesting. Noah did not hold my attention, partly because I never recovered from the negotiation scene. He picks up a companion early, someone helping him conceal what he is, and their dialogue is flat. The supporting cast made no impression at all.

The prose is on the rougher side. I would not call it bad. It is not clumsy or full of errors. It just never does anything, and paired with everything else, "not very interesting" is the fairest description I can give the whole package.

The narration, which I want to be careful about

I do not usually go after narrators. It is often impossible to tell from the outside whether a performance problem is the reader, the direction, the engineering, or the day they happened to be having.

I am going to make an exception, and then immediately hedge it.

This is the worst narration I have heard in a long time. I want to be precise about that rather than reach for a superlative, because I have heard genuinely unlistenable audiobooks and this is not one of them. It is clear. You can follow it. If you are set on finishing the book, the audio will not stop you. It just is not pleasant, and across twelve hours that adds up.

The voices are barely differentiated. Noah, the merchants, the passing cart drivers, most of the minor cast: they all sit in the same register with the same quality to them, which is a pronounced nasal tone that runs through everything. Noah's voice is the worst of them, somewhere between a petulant child and the sitcom shorthand for an old man who talks through his sinuses. It does not fit an adventuring lead and I cannot believe it was chosen deliberately. Aria's voice comes off better, mostly because the accent used for her rolls the sounds together in a way that masks the nasality, and the lower pitch helps.

Now the part where I admit what I do not know.

The narrator is Peter Kenny. He narrates The Witcher. He recorded twenty-three of Iain M. Banks's Culture novels. His reputation is built specifically on multi-character work, which is exactly what I am saying does not happen here. That is not a small contradiction and I am not going to pretend it away.

I have not heard any of his other work, so I have no baseline. What I can say is that this does not sound like raw lack of talent. He speaks clearly. Nothing is garbled, the emphasis lands on the right syllables, and it is plainly a person rather than a synthetic voice. What it sounds like is somebody congested, or a bad microphone, or something introduced in post that was never cleaned up. It is consistent across the entire book, which points at equipment or condition rather than performance choices.

If I had not checked, I would have guessed at a first-time reader on a low budget. I checked, and that guess is wrong, so I am left describing what I heard and admitting I cannot account for it.

For the grade: this lands at 2.5 rather than the bottom of the scale, and the difference matters. A 1 belongs to narration that actively defeats the book, where you lose words and have to rewind. That is not this. Every sentence arrives intact. The problem is monotony and that nasal quality sitting over everything, which makes it a chore rather than an obstacle.

The rating problem

This is the part that made me write the review.

Voidborne sits at 4.6 on Amazon. I have covered plenty of series in the C, D and F range that sit at 4.5 or better, which is a problem I have written about at length in The Amazon 4-Star Lie. The whole genre is compressed into about four tenths of a star, and inside a band that narrow the number carries almost no information.

The blurb has its own tell. It pitches the book to fans of Iron Prince, He Who Fights with Monsters, crunchy LitRPG, and Road to Mastery. Those are four things with very little in common. When marketing reaches for the biggest names in the genre rather than describing what the book actually is, I have learned to lower my expectations, and I have rarely been wrong.

Where it lands

E. That is a tier I use rarely and I want to justify it rather than just assign it.

D-tier usually means a book with one thing working. This does not have one. The premise asked more of me than it earned, the protagonist never became a person, the prose does nothing, the supporting cast is flat, and the audio is a slog. Seven hours in, across two separate attempts, with nothing pulling me forward.

It is not offensive and it did not make me angry, which is what keeps it out of F. It is simply a book where I cannot find the part worth your credit.

Verdict

Not Worth the Credit. If the cover caught your eye, and it is a striking cover in a way that suggests a different genre entirely, spend the credit on something from the recommendations instead.