Audiobook Review – Storybound (Storybound, Book 1) by Marissa Burt (3/5 stars)

Reading Level: Middle Grade
Genre: Fantasy
Length: 416 pages (9 hours and 2 minutes)
Publisher: Audible Studios
Release Date: October 22, 2013
ASIN: B00FM82012
Stand Alone or Series: 1st book in the Storybound duology
Source: Audiobook from Audible.com
Rating: 3/5 stars

I had been wanting to read this story for a while. It ended up being okay, but was a bit slow at parts with characters that weren’t all that engaging.

I listened to this on audiobook and the audiobook was actually very well done. The narrator did an excellent job on character voices and it made for a pleasant listen.

This is a story about a young girl named Una Fairchild who gets Written In (WI) to the Land of Story. There she has to figure out why she’s a WI and who wrote her in. The Land of Story is in upheaval and it might be up to Una to save it.

This is really just the first half of the story. Nothing is resolved and the book ends right in the middle of the story…something I am not overly fond of.

The above being said I thought this book was decent but not great. I really enjoyed the idea of characters being written into stories (it was a like a simplified version of the Thursday Next series). I also enjoyed the idea of characters being type-cast and trained to be the sorts of characters they are assigned to be.

Unfortunately I thought our heroine, Una, was extremely abrasive and obnoxious. I also thought the initial description of her as a quiet loner did not at all fit how she acted in Story…which was generally aggressive and easily offended. There were a few contradictions like that throughout the story.

I also just got kind of bored with it all about halfway through. The story is fairly predictable and there is alot about the politics of the realm, which got a bit slow at points. In the end, even though it ends mid-story, I really wasn’t all that curious about what will happen to these characters.

Overall this is an okay story but nothing exceptional. The story was slow at parts,.predictable, and I thoroughly disliked the main character of Una. As a result, I probably won’t read Story’s End which ties up this duology.

This book goes towards the following reading challenges:
– Audio Book Reading Challenge
– You Read How Many Books? Reading Challenge