Unexpectedly good

This story has a very interesting idea behind it, read with beautiful, soft, natural expressiveness by one of my favourite narrators, Susan Bennett.

A young mother loses her child on a moonlit mountain the night of a comet. A few years later her husband dies. Another moonlit comet causes her to be pulled through the same time travelling wormhole that her daughter apparently disappeared through, and she finds herself back in the 18th century.

The people, customs and dress are all brilliantly described, but once she is there, nothing seems to happen for ages. It's as if the story gets stuck until Chapter 18.
There is plenty of interesting detail, but nothing keeps happening apart from daily minutiae. There's not a clue about her daughter... no leads... nothing.

Then suddenly towards the end of chapter 18 the action starts up again. Her daughter reappears right under her nose where she would least expect to see her, but now she faces the agonising dilemma of whether to take her home, or leave her and return home alone, or whether to stay in the 18th Century with her.

The rest of the story is filled with all the grisly detail of the civil war, carnage and battles, as she is immersed in trying to save her ancestral home from ruin.

This is obviously a heap more interesting if you're American. I'm a British reader and so the American Civil War doesn't mean so much to me. Still I enjoyed this story very much.

The second story is read by a different narrator, and I have given up on it halfway purely because of this. I love Susan Bennett's narration so much that listening to this other narrator is not an enjoyable experience for me. She reads in a slow, deliberate, overly dramatic way, enunciating words with unneeded emphasis. I cannot fathom why they didn't keep Susan Bennett to narrate both stories, as the whole reason I bought this book was because she was the narrator. I didn't realise that she wasn't narrating both books.

The story plunges the listener straight into the action of a frantic flight across the country to save a sister without introducing or getting to know any of the characters.... which immediately has turned me off, as I can't sympathise so much with people I don't know.

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