Jacey Bedford's Journal

Narrated by Rebecca Norfolk

The human race has left Earth in a huge fleet of arks, all travelling in a loose convoy. Eryn and her sister, Shay, are navigators. When Shay goes missing on the planet Candidate-623, Eryn insists on being part of the rescue crew on a trailblazer ship, only to discover that Shay and her team are all dead, and the thing that killed them is terrifying, powerful, and implacable. When whatever it is follows her back to the fleet, people start dying and Eryn, having rescued Shay's teenage daughter from her home ark ship, is sent to find the ancient recluse who might be able to communicate with a powerul alien and this save humanity. This is fast-paced, intriguing and well worth a listen or read.

The narration is easy on the ear, but, of dear, why can't Rebecca Norfolk pronounce some common English words? Bow, when it's the front end of a ship, rhymes with plough, not toe. A trimaran (ship with three hulls) is pronounced TRY-maran not trimmer-an. Someone's middle is their midriff, not mid-rift. Habitable is HAbitable, not haBITable.  Ochre - as in the colour - is pronounced o-ker, not okra (which is something completely different). And those are just five mispronunciations that I jotted down within about ten minutes while I happened to have a pen and paper handy. There were loads more. It didn't exactly spoil the story but it did niggle. Even the preview has 'cobblt' instead of cobalt. Why didn't the producer spot all these mistakes? I did wonder if the narrator was American with a good English accent, but no, I looked her up and RP English is her native accent. I also notice that her voicecall-online page says she has a home studio, so this might have been recorded without a producer, in which case... pity about the ultimate quality control. Mispronunciation aside, the vocal quality is excellent and she voices the characters well.