DNF Audiobook Review – The Weight of Blood (Half-Orcs, Book 1) by David Dalglish, Narrated by C.J. McAllister (2/5 stars)

Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Fantasy
Length: 6 hours and 38 minutes (226 pages)
Publisher: Dalglish Audio
Release Date: July 14, 2016
ASIN: B01IE144EY
Stand Alone or Series: 1st book in the Half-Orcs series
Source: Audiobook from Audible.com
Rating: 2/5 stars

“Five hundred years ago, brother gods devastated their world with civil war. When they were imprisoned, their conflict ended without a victor. Centuries passed while their followers secretly continued the war, a war that will soon have an end. The gods have found their paragons.

When half-bloods Harruq and Qurrah Tun pledged their lives to the death prophet Velixar, they sought only escape from their squalid beginnings. Instead they become his greatest disciples, charged with leading his army of undead. While they prepare, Harruq trains with an elf named Aurelia, to whom he owes his life. She is a window into a better world, but as war spreads between the races, their friendship takes a dire turn.

Velixar orders them to fight alongside the humans, changing Aurelia from friend to foe. To protect her, Harruq must turn against his brother and fight the killing nature of his orcish heritage. To side with one means to turn on another. No matter Harruq’s decision, someone he loves will die.”

This is the first book in the Half-Orc series. Right now there are seven books in this series. This is a very standard “swords and sorcery” type of book. I ended up not finishing it because of the awful audiobook narration.

I listened to the first couple hours of this on audiobook and the narration was painfully awful. The narrator sounded a bit like a male robot and his voices for characters were distractedly fake. I keep getting in the car to listen to this and telling myself “the narration can’t be as bad as I thought it was” and then the audiobook would start up and I would wince in pain at how awful it was…shudders…

In the first couple hours there wasn’t anything in the story that grabbed my attention and given the incredibly distracting and poor narration I decided to stop reading this. The story basically follows two half-orc brothers who go up against a necromancer. As I said pretty standard old school fantasy fare. I think I might have enjoyed the story some if the narration hadn’t been so awful and distracting.

Overall this “standard fare” fantasy story wasn’t good enough to distract me from the absolutely awful narration of this audiobook. If you are going to give this series a try, do not listen to it on audiobook.

This book goes towards the following reading challenges:
– Goodreads Reading Challenge
– Mount TBR Reading Challenge