My original Blood River Down audiobook review and many others can be found at Audiobook Reviewer.

Gideon Sunday, an in between jobs professional football player, one day discovers that the back wall of his pantry has disappeared, and that it now leads to another place. Glorian has come from this new place and asks Gideon for help to try to find a white duck.

This is one of those fantasy books pretending to be humorous by using of absurd scenes. It did not quite work for me this time, in part because the characters were plain and one-dimensional, which prevented me to connect to them, and because the situations and conversations were not really funny. If at least I could see some depth I could have enjoyed the jokes and puns, but the characters were very caricaturesque and their speech was absurd most of the time.

The story is slowly paced and there is a lot of deus ex machina. New characters are introduced with new situations, but the way it is done is quite chaotic and it gives a disjointed feel to the book.

This is one of those books where the way has more importance than the goal itself, and neither Gideon nor us know what is at stake in the search for the duck. This made the quest a bit pointless, but I understand that Grant wanted us to focus on the little things along the way. I just wish that his humor would have worked better with me. I found most of the things not funny at all.

The narration was correctly done but the characters voices just emphasized the fact that they seem dumb and just mere caricatures. The female voices were especially annoying. I understand that some male narrators could have some difficulties with this, but other seem to be able to pull it off. Why Jack Chekijian decided to have them sound plain and dumb, I do not know. Maybe the jokes did not work for me because this was overdone.

All in all, it is not a bad book. It is full of imaginative details and jokes that could have worked if they did not overload the book and the character voices were done in a bit subtler way.

Audiobook was provided for review by the narrator. ( )