Helen Archer Audiobooks

The 8 Kingdoms: young adult adventure where loyalty is the first casualty

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.9/5 average

12 listener ratings

Who is Helen Archer?

Young adult is the shelf, and The 8 Kingdoms is the world. Helen Archer writes for teenage listeners inside an invented realm built to carry a sequence, and Bonds of Betrayal, as the title promises, concerns itself with allegiance and the many ways it fails.

Fiction written for this age group is often judged unfairly by adults who have read very little of it. The best of it moves quickly, takes its characters’ choices seriously and refuses to soften consequences, which is precisely the register a story about betrayal needs. Little is documented about the author, so the writing is the honest measure, and the writing is confident about who it is speaking to.

Helen Archer in audiobooks

Katie Hall narrates across eight and a half hours, a length that suits younger listeners and busy ones alike, and one that keeps the story moving without demanding a marathon.

The handful of verdicts logged so far skew high, though there are far too few of them to draw any conclusion from. As part of The 8 Kingdoms it works best taken in sequence, and it makes a fair test of whether this is a world you want to spend more time in. Details are below.