Texts from Jane Eyre: and Other Conversations with Your Favorite Literary Characters (audiobook) by Mallory Ortberg, narrated by Zach Villa, Amy Landon

Texts from Jane Eyre: and Other Conversations with Your Favorite Literary Characters is a humorous collection of texts various famous characters and people might have sent, if they had had the ability to text.

Review:

I had previously read a few of these online, and liked them. I wanted to read the book but, with my TBR, who knows when I'd ever have gotten around to getting a copy? When Audible had this on sale for a dollar, I was interested but hesitant. How well would it translate into audio form?

Pretty well, as it turns out. One of the reasons I bought this, besides the price, was because the narrators (Zach Villa for the male parts, Amy Landon for the female) were so good. They made all the texting, even the emoticons, sound natural.

I felt iffier about the content. I preferred it when it was characters from famous works texting each other, although Ortberg took a lot of liberties with some of them. For example, the texts between Jane Eyre's Jane, Rochester, and St. John were funny while still, I felt, staying pretty true to the characters, while the texts between Sherlock and Watson, though funny, presented Sherlock as being such a cocaine fanatic he could barely be bothered to think about anything else.

Sometimes it was famous authors or philosophers texting, like Emily Dickinson, Rene Descartes, or William Blake. Those bits included what I'm assuming were direct quotes from their works, texted as though they were the thoughts and experiences they were having right at that moment. It was occasionally funny but often bizarre, and not nearly as clever as some of the texts from fictional characters.

I wish the sections hadn't been quite so mixed up. I'd have preferred it if all the Hamlet sections had been together, all the Daisy Miller, all the Great Gatsby, etc. In audio form it was difficult having to switch gears so much, especially since my knowledge of some of these people and works was often shaky or nonexistent.

All in all, this was an okay two hours and twenty minutes worth of listening. I probably wouldn't have been happy with it if I had paid Audible's member price for it, or if I had used one of my credits, but it was worth the dollar sale price.