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Faro's Daughter

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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Renowned gamester and the first to admit that he is entirely void of a romantic disposition, Max Ravenscar regards all eligible females with indifference and unconcern.

But when he meets the woman his young cousin Adrian is bent on marrying - the beautiful Deborah Grantham, mistress of her aunt's gaming house - he finds that none of his experience in risk and gambling has prepared him for such a worthy opponent.

©1941 Georgette Heyer (P)2021 Penguin Audio Classics Historical Historical Fiction Regency Regency Romance Romance

Critic reviews

"Georgette Heyer is unbeatable." (Sunday Telegraph)
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I love this Georgette Heyer story and the narrator generally does a good job although I think she could make Deb a bit more fiery in places - also for some reason Lucius Kennett is played as a cockney rather than the Irish captain that he is. This sounds a bit odd as the language is unchanged. All in all really enjoyed it though

Good narration with a few oddities

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Loved it. Could visualise it as I heard it. Great fun. Narrator engaging; different voices not brilliant but quite adequate.

one of my favorite georgette heyers

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Another blinder from GH. The characters are silly as can be, apart from Deb and Ravenscar.

Fab!

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It’s a shame that Penguin don’t make more efforts to find readers who understand Heyer’s novels. The new recordings clearly seek to cash in on Regency mania, but neither performers nor production staff seem to know the material or the period.

Not only do all kinds of phrases, sayings and figures of speech get garbled by an uncomprehending reader but whole characters are woefully misrepresented.

A glaring example: how on earth did no one involved in this particular recording not pick up that Lucius Kennett is Irish? And how did no one realise that giving him a working class cockney accent was wrong on every level?

Reading an author like Heyer requires far more than mere diction. Expression can only come through understanding and these books deserve better!

No slight meant on that reader’s acting ability or clarity of diction etc which are both excellent. But she clearly doesn’t understand the material and that is a real shame.

Classic Heyer, slightly marred by the ignorance of the performance

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Over years I’ve collected all the previous ‘generation’ of Georgette Heyer’s regency audiobooks, nearly all brilliantly brought to life by narrators who knew how to pronounce her language. I’m glad of that as this new issue, mainly young narrators, are often tripped up by words that aren’t familiar to them, and the editors/producers apparently don’t know enough themselves to correct them. Faro’s Daughter was one of the rare ones not well narrated in the previous collection so I thought I’d try this version, as I’ve heard Daphne Koumar before and enjoyed her work.
A bit disappointed, particularly with Lucius Kennet who has some lovely Irish turns of phrase but is speaking them in a accent placing him nearer East or South London. You can understand her not knowing Berkeley is pronounced Barclay, but thinking that the wine, claret, rhymes with ballet? Just two examples of irritating mispronunciations that detract from the pleasure of listening,
On balance I think I’ll return it and stick with the original I already have, no point in having two that are both sub par.

Not sure whether to finish this one or to return

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