David Estes Audiobooks

Fatemarked: the opening of an epic, nineteen hours in the voice of Derek Perkins

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.3/5 average

5 listener ratings

Who is David Estes?

Naming a sequence The Fatemarked Epic is a promise, and David Estes makes it plainly. Epic is a word with obligations attached: many voices, a long horizon, a world whose rules matter enough to be learned rather than assumed. The opening volume runs past nineteen hours, so the promise is being kept at least in the matter of scale.

Our catalogue files the work with teen and young adult listening, the tradition in which a good deal of the genre’s most ambitious world building has been born. That shelf carries fewer constraints than outsiders tend to imagine. What it does reliably demand is pace, and a lead the listener is willing to follow into the dark.

David Estes in audiobooks

Fatemarked arrives narrated by Derek Perkins, and at that length the reading has real work to do: a cast this size lives or dies on whether a listener can tell one voice from another across nineteen hours.

Ratings so far are warm but thin on the ground, so the score is better read as an early signal than as a settled verdict. The sensible approach with any epic is the obvious one. Begin at the first volume, give it the opening two hours, and let the world do its own arguing.

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