Girl Reading cover art

Girl Reading

 Preview

Get 30 days of Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30-day free trial. Cancel monthly.
Try for £0.00
More purchase options
Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

About this listen

An orphan poses nervously for a Renaissance maestro in medieval Siena, and an artist's servant girl in seventeenth-century Amsterdam snatches a moment away from her work to lose herself in tales of knights and battles. In a Victorian photography studio, a woman holds a book that she barely acknowledges while she waits for the exposure, and in a Shoreditch bar in 2008 a woman reading catches the eye of a young man who takes her picture.

©2011 Katie Ward (P)2012 Oakhill Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction

Critic reviews

"Ward is wise, poised, and utterly original. Her eye and her words are fresh, as if she is inventing the world." (Hilary Mantel)
"A wonderful , imaginative evocation . . . It's a book packed full of adventures and stories and you completely lose yourself in them as Ward races through time from the 1300s and into the future . . . Like David Mitchell, Ward is equally adept at shifting between completely different registers and voices . . . Girl Reading has real beating heart." (Viv Groskop, The Times)
"A lively, irreverent journey through history." (Katie Allen, Time Out Book of the Week)
"If you're planning to pack any holiday books this year, make sure Girl Reading is one of them." (Cosmopolitan)
All stars
Most relevant
I am only part way through this audiobook so far, and am enjoying the story, however the more I listen and think about it the weirder I find the narration.

It's hard to explain. The non-dialogue bits are fine; slightly whimsically read and I quite like it. The dialogue parts however are quite peculiar. In all other audiobooks I've listened to the narrator "acts" the speeches rather than just narrating them, using the intonations and expressions as if they were actually being spoken. Dialogue/conversations/speeches in this audiobook are not performed this way; instead they are read, often very quickly with no pause before the speech, as if they are still being "narrated" rather than spoken by a character. It can make the book quite hard to follow and it is often difficult to distinguish between general narration and characters speaking.

I hope this makes sense! It's difficult to put my finger on why I find it harder than other audiobooks to follow. The excerpt in the sample doesn't really demonstrate the issue as much as it could, because in that short clip the voices are "acted" more than elsewhere in the book.

By no means would I advise people against the book for reasons of the narration; I just find it requires a lot more concentration than others I have "read".

Good so far but strange narration!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

What would have made Girl Reading better?

fewer chapters. gave up on 6 and 7.

What could Katie Ward have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?

chose a character and showed the change in that person's lifetime from having a portrait painted to the first photograph and the impact it had on society.

What did you like about the performance? What did you dislike?

jane walker did a reasonable job in reading this book as I understand there were no quotation marks in the book to indicate when a person was speaking or just thinking.

You didn’t love this book--but did it have any redeeming qualities?

the initial idea was good but it didn't work. there were some good observations but they didn't save the book.

Any additional comments?

the chapters ended abruptly leaving the listener wondering what happened next and the beginning of the next chapter (story) was just as abrupt which was disconcerting.
I started the first and second chapters twice the rest flowed a bit better.

disappointing.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This book has a very interesting format following a number of girls from very different time periods and very different lives.

All of the stories involved reading and the capturing of a picture of each of them in the process of their reading.

I liked the different stories and following each for me was fine. The last story adds a different dimension and was linked to the previous one and the others and I thought it was really quite clever.

The reservations were with the narration - as another reviewer says it was clear and well read but.. and my but was around the transitions - within and between stories - there were no clear gaps - if you "blinked" you found yourself in the next story and things were not making sense at all. Also, you realised that you could not answer the question - what was the ending of the previous story? This happened to me about three times and it was very irritating. I think that what was needed was more pauses.

Overall I did not feel that I wasted my time in listening to this and would recommend it although with the warnings about the narration.

Interesting - clever but with some reservations

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The performance of this was so over the top that I had to stop listening. Awful cod italian accent and overacting ruined what could have been an interesting story.

Badly read

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I choose this as an extra book between my credits. I used the 'reccommended reads' email as a guide as it had some good reviews (also had a couple of bad ones) but i chose to listen to the good reviews and boy, I wish I hadn't. Each chapter is an individual little story and I think of the 6 (?) I only enjoyed 2 or 3. The first one I had to restart 4 times before it finally caught and I had to thoroughly concentrate in order to 'get it'. And there was another chapter I just gave up on (something I have never done before with Audible). Sorry but I didn't enjoy this and I certainly wouldn't reccommend it.

I'm Sorry, didnt enjoy it

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews