Acquired Audiobook By: I started to listen to audiobooks in [2016] as a way to offset my readings of print books whilst noting there was a rumour about how audiobooks could help curb chronic migraines as you are switching up how you’re reading rather than allowing only one format to be your bookish choice. As I found colouring, knitting and playing solitaire agreeable companions to listening to audiobooks, I embarked on a new chapter of my reading life where I spend time outside of print editions of the stories I love reading and exchange them for audio versions.
Through hosting for Audiobookworm Promotions (which is now Audiobook Empire*), I’ve expanded my knowledge of authors who are producing audio versions of their stories. Meanwhile, I am also curating my own wanderings in audio via my local library who uses Overdrive and/or CloudLibrary for their digital audiobook catalogues. Aside from my libraries, I also enjoy having Audible & Scribd memberships as my budget allows. It has been a wonderful journey and one I enjoy sharing – as I am now fully expanding how many audiobooks I listen to per year whilst enjoying being a part of the LibroFM ALC programme and an audiobook reviewer for NetGalley as well.
I received a complimentary audiobook copy of “Search for the Holy Grail” via Audiobook Empire who is working with the author on this blog tour in exchange for an honest review. I did not receive compensation for my opinions or thoughts shared herein.
NOTE: (*) The Audiobook Empire is run and owned by Jess @ Audiobookworm Promotions; as a reviewer and book blogger with her promotions company for audiobooks, audio publishers, narrators and authors – it felt like a natural transition to find titles I would be interested in reviewing via Audiobook Empire. Some of those reviews will run during audio blog tours and some will run outside of them. In 2022, she decided to merge the promotional side of Audiobookworm Promotions into Audiobook Empire rather than maintain the two separately.
Hallo, Hallo dear hearts!
I am starting to dive back into reading per my latest #WWWWednesday wherein I discussed my unexpected sabbatical from reading, blogging and engaging whilst mentioning that it is through audiobooks and Cosy Mysteries, I am starting to make my journey back into stories and the joys they have always given me as a reader. For today’s post, I am taking part on an audiobook blog tour – one of my first in a long absence from hosting for Audiobookworm Promotions which is now known directly as Audiobook Empire. Jess made the transition this year to merge her promotional side of her business into her audiobook producing company which I felt was a fantastic move on her part as everything is inclusive and together now.
It is a credit to Jess @ the Audiobookworm who first tipped my hat into considering to listen to audiobooks and to this day is one of the key reasons why I fell in love with audiobooks as much as I have throughout the past six years. By participating on her blog tours, I’ve developed a good sense of narration styles that I prefer and have found many beloved narrators who unexpected walked into my life through their audiobooks which arrived in my ears! It has been such a clever journey – to re-discover the artfulness of a story through an audio presentation.
Thereby this marks my first listen as a returning audiobook listener and my first blog tour as a returning blog tour hostess. If you haven’t yet heard of the Audiobook Empire, I encourage you to check out their website and also, if you’re a book blogger who is just getting familiar with audiobooks, I encourage you to consider hosting for the Empire, too. If you’re already a huge fan of audiobooks, the Empire is where you want to become a part of as a listener.
Search for the Holy Grail
by MJL Evans, GM O' Connor
Source: Audiobook Empire
Narrator: Anne Marie Lewis
Every pirate in the Caribbean is searching for The Holy Grail - a ship carrying the treasury of Hanover and the countess Aurora of Calenberg, suspected of orchestrating the theft. Prinz Maximilian will stop at nothing to catch her and regain the fortune, even if it means following her into the deepest, darkest recesses of Samaná Bay. With pirates and cutthroats at every turn, will she be reunited with her handmaiden, Helena and her portrait painter, Dodo? Aurora’s only solace is in a bottle of Cognac with a chaser of coca-leaf powder in this vibrant, fast-paced chase through the Caribbean.
Places to find the book:
ASIN: B0B6RSD9Y6
Published by Audiobook Empire
on 18th July, 2022
Format: Audiobook | Digital
Length: 19 hours and 20 minutes (unabridged)
Published by: The Audiobook Empire (@AudiobookEmpire)
Converse via: #HistoricalFiction, #HistFic or #Pirates
as well as #TheAudiobookEmpire
I’ll be honest, I chose to spotlight this audiobook today because I want to talk about the narrator moreso than the story because I found myself struggling to connect to the components of the story past the short sampler, I heard prior to listening to the audiobook for the blog tour. Generally speaking, I thought this story might parlay into an enjoyable read for me but there were a few missteps for me as a listener at the beginning of the story which disconnected me from the overall plot – wherein, what held my ear to the narration was actually the narrating styling of Ms Lewis – because she has such an incredible depth of character and performance to where you are simply bewitched by how she conveys emotion and thought through how she’s performing the narration itself. Which is why I am expanding my remarks to be inclusively about the narrator, and how she approached performing the story which was such a blessing to hear and to experience.
I am not sure if I will go further with the story – as I am just getting back into listening to audiobooks and reading stories again in print – but for whichever reason, this week, what struck me the most about Search for the Holy Grail was how wickedly brilliant Ms Lewis performed the story moreso than I felt anchoured into the thread of the story itself. And that is what I wanted to discuss the most today for the blog tour – is the wonderful gift Ms Lewis has as a narrator, which is why this is more of a Narrator Review moreso than a review of the story.
As a side note on content, there was a moment where I felt this story tipped its toes to be less romantic and more erotic in describing romantic liaisons and encounters whereas I also felt there were a bit more graphically described violent encounters as well. Both of which didn’t sit well with me because I wasn’t expecting them to be in the story. Thereby if you might not find those instances your cuppa tea as well, due note there are some moments that might affect you as they did me. I hadn’t realised the authors write Erotica as well and that was a misstep on my behalf for not researching more of what they write – as although, I’ve read authors who write Erotica on one side of their career but write Romance on the other, I haven’t encountered where the two are merged rather than separate as I would consider this one to be more in that other wheelhouse than the one I regularly read which is traditional Romance or Women’s Fiction.
About Anne Marie Lewis
Singer and actor Anne Marie Lewis has enjoyed a richly varied and long career in the performing arts. She has performed across the globe from Carnegie Hall to Boise to Little Rock to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula as well as in Canada, England and Scotland.
Chicago area credits: My Fair Lady, Peter Pan, Into the Woods (Music Theater Works); 1776 (Porchlight Music Theater); Midnight Cowboy (Lifeline Theatre); Northanger Abbey, The Skin of Our Teeth (Remy Bumppo); Love, Loss and What I Wore (Oil Lamp Theater); bare (RefugeTheatre Project); Graveyard of Empires (16th Street Theater); Jake’s Women (Spartan Theatre); The Scullery Maid (Idle Muse Theatre); Moon Over Buffalo (Jedlicka Performing Arts Center); The Diary of Anne Frank (Metropolis Performing Arts Center); The Merry Wives of Windsor (Fury Theatre); Fancy Nancy, Elephant and Piggie (Northbrook Theater); Little Red Riding Hood, Camp Wonderland (Theatre at the Center), Don Giovanni, Shining Brow (Chicago Opera Theatre); Pride and Prejudice, The Sound of Music, Hansel and Gretel, Persuasion, Cosi fan tutte (Chamber Opera Chicago); Gianni Schicchi (DuPage Opera); La boheme, Die Fledermaus, Don Pasquale, Don Giovanni, Carmen (Opera Studio Highland Park).
Regional credits: Die Fledermaus, Le nozze di Figaro (Pine Mountain Music Festival), Little Women (Lyric Opera Cleveland), La boheme (Quad Cities Opera, Arkansas Symphony, Battle Creek Symphony); Mozart Requiem, Schubert Mass in G (Carnegie Hall).
International credits: Persuasion (Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Camden Fringe Festival, Buxton Fringe Festival, Victoria, BC).
Anne Marie, a Pittsburgh native, is a proud graduate of the University of Notre Dame and Northwestern University and an even prouder mother to her four young men.. She is also a sought-after audiobook narrator, a genre she loves dearly as she gets to be producer, director, technical crew and all the characters!
*Biography updated: August, 2022
In regard to the audiobook directly:
I am appreciative of Ms Jess providing a cursory outline of how best to articulate my listening hours on behalf of this audiobook and the others I shall be blogging about or reviewing in future. I’ve modified the suggestions to what I felt were pertinent to respond too on my own behalf as well as keeping to the questions I felt were relevant to share.
Number of Times I’ve heard the Narrator(s):
This is my second time listening to Anne Marie Lewis, as I enjoyed listening to another audiobook this narrator has narrated. The story was Winterdream which I haven’t yet had the pleasure of finishing to listen too – but the narrator’s style is what captured me along with the writer’s vision of the story itself. Whenever I find a narrator I enjoy hearing, they become part of my growing list of preferred ‘voices’ for audiobook. I am thankful I have a second chance at hearing her style of narration with Search for the Holy Grail and as Winterdream is still on my TBR and backlogue list of selections to finish reading/listening too – I am hopeful before years’ end I can count it amongst my 2022 reads.
How the story sounded to me as it was being Read: (theatrical or narrative)
This is a very performative narration for an audiobook – meaning, that Ms Lewis truly shines as a performer and as a narrator! She has a wonderful gift for etching out a character simply by how she’s becoming them by voice and even the choices in accents she gave to certain characters made them stand out more to me in this audiobook as it felt like a much larger cast of actors and narrators than a single narrator at the helm! I LOVE whenever a narrator can make that illusion for us as a listener because it helps expand the centre of the story and the world therein. You can tell she enjoyed settling into the characterisations she was voicing whilst just seeing her artfulness in bringing them to life was spellbinding because she makes you want to hear more of her performance.
Regards to Articulation & Performance of the story:
Articulation:
Lewis has a very apt and particular eye on articulating each word and phrase of her narration – she has a brilliant conveyance of the context of the story even if I couldn’t completely attach myself to the components of the story or find my traction within the forward movement of the story – that doesn’t mean it wasn’t articulated brilliantly by Lewis herself. If you want to find a narrator who can shift between characters and most of whom have different accents and dialects of speech, Lewis is the narrator who can handle that kind of transitional movement within a story for audiobook.
Performance:
Ooh! This was my favourite part of listening to Search for the Holy Grail – listening to how Lewis performed it and how she etched out this impression of the characters she was narrating. She has a wonderful conception of moving you in and out of the characters’ entrances and exits by giving you such a wonderful capacity of place within their lines and paces to where you literally felt one character left and another performer had just entered the scene because she enlarged your understanding of the ensemble cast by etching out individual characters wherein it felt like a larger cast than a single performance of narration. To me that is gold. Whenever I find a narrator who can give us that kind of entrance into a story, it makes listening to them even more enjoyable because it creates this interesting perception and observation of the world they are narrating.
Preference after listening to re-Listen or pick up the book in Print?
I believe this story would best suit to be heard rather than read – as for me, it was Ms Lewis’s performance which hooked me as a reader and as an audiobook listener. She truly paints these characters alive and gives you a fuller depth of their person simply by how she understood how to portray them by voice and narrative guidance for us the reader.
In closing, would I seek out another Anne Marie Lewis audiobook?
I am definitely seeking out more of her audiobooks and narrations! I am grateful to have had a chance to hear her voice and narrative styling again even if this story didn’t quite connect with me as a reader – she has a wonderful gift for bringing characters to life and giving you such a wickedly delightful joy in being centred on her voice as she performs!
This Audio blog tour is courtesy of:
Remember to follow via @AudiobookEmpire:
{SOURCES: Book cover for “Search for the Holy Grail”, book synopsis, authors biographies as well as the audio tour banner and tour host badge were all provided by Audiobook Empire and are used with permission. Post dividers and My Thoughts badge by Fun Stuff for Your Blog via Pure Imagination. Tweets were embedded due to codes provided by Twitter. Blog graphics created by Jorie via Canva: Audiobook Review banner and the Comment Box Banner.}
Copyright © Jorie Loves A Story, 2022.
I’m a social reader, I tweet my bookish life
Praise for #audiobook #narrator @LewisAnneMarie whilst hosting @artistmjlevans via #AudiobookEmpire!
'Ms Lewis truly shines as a performer and as a narrator! A wonderful gift for etching out characters simply by how she's becoming them by voice'👏
🎧📖https://t.co/oaJHdbXh5X pic.twitter.com/sl5MaFnNY2
— Jorie Story 📖🎧 (@joriestory) August 27, 2022
Comments & Shares on Twitter:
An Audiobook Blog Tour | "Search for the Holy Grail" (Volumes: 1-3 Boxed Set) produced by The Audiobook Empire, writ by MJL Evans and GM O'Connor https://t.co/8x88n3iK3K via @joriestory
— Megan Evans (@meganjlevansart) August 27, 2022
Thank you so much! I loved performing this book. So many characters! So many accents!
— Anne Marie Lewis 🇺🇸🇮🇪🇵🇭 (@LewisAnneMarie) August 27, 2022
Thank you for this sweet review! I loved working on this audiobook. https://t.co/xzG94QRJ7u
— Anne Marie Lewis 🇺🇸🇮🇪🇵🇭 (@LewisAnneMarie) August 27, 2022
What a great review for @LewisAnneMarie – https://t.co/5xseQNyQLi
— Lianne Walker (@lwreads) August 27, 2022
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