I liked the story well enough, but I have to admit I didn't really like the voice the mother bird was portrayed with, if only because it was pretty annoying. Maybe that was the point though =).
I agree with you completely. And if that was the point, maybe a different point should have been made instead. That voice was almost too much to continue listening to the story at times.
To be fair, it matched Anna Eley's bird voice from previous versions quite well.
I had the same reaction as kristofor.wilson. and motoyugota.
The voice of the mother bird in this version really grated on me. This is not a negative comment on the narrator (he did a much better job than I would have!). It’s just that he has a broad, sonorous, deep, and resonant masculine voice—like that of an announcer. And it just didn't lend itself well to the high-pitched feminine and yet assertive voice required of the bluebird Mrs. Tweedlechirp. It was straining against the comfortable boundaries of his natural register. (Hope I’ve put that correctly). She ended up sounding quite a bit more nagging than assertive (or, perhaps, like a man portraying a nagging woman).
(Haha. It’s funny to analyze the story so much. But that character of Mrs. Tweedlechirp is kind of cool because she’s this very strong maternal character. She has the heart of a dragon but squeezed into the tiny body of a bluebird. You can imagine her squaring off against a lion –or a powerful wizard—to protect her son. Somehow I think that Anna was able to capture that.)
After I read Unblinking's comment that this one matched Anna Eley’s voice from the previous versions, I went back and listened again. And I thought, ‘Nah. Not really.’ To my ears, the two portrayals sounded extremely different.
As for the story itself, again I agree with another poster’s comment:
I was almost bored by this one until about the halfway point, until the story finally started to involve me. That may have been excessive tiredness on my part (it was the end of a looooong day), or a lack of familiarity with the previous adventures of Squonk, but I'm not desperate to seek out the earlier stories.
Clearly it's the minority opinion, but I don't think this one was for me.
For some reason, the story really started to grab me after the wizard returned to the clearing with renewed purpose--sometime like around 32 minutes or something. For some reason, after that it really drew me in and started ‘to work’. I ended up really liking and it wanting very much to hear what would come next for this unique band of apprentices and wizard.
These three stories are really laying the groundwork for an entire world. I can see this very easily as a comic book or cartoon or eventually a novel-length book or series of novels. But I think the nature of the stories lends itself well to serialization. It’s fun to let each episode digest a bit before the next one comes to move the action further along. (Maybe because each episode ends with a kind of definite resolution of a problem (as well as the promise of another problem tentatively peeking out in the distance).
Well, at any rate, thanks for yet another wonderful story and telling! Really appreciate this.
Nigel
