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I listened to Remember Mia, by Alexandra Burt, narrated by Mia Ellis. I had high hopes for this, but it turned out to be a dud all around--the writing was overwrought and repetitive, and the narrator was not good. What can you say when a narrator pronounces landfills as "landfeels" and refills as "refeels," and routinely overemphasizes the s at the end of a plural?
The story here involved the disappearance of a seven-month-old baby from her home and the bizarre behavior of her mother, who was suffering from undiagnosed post-partum psychosis before the disappearance and has amnesia afterward when she's found (with a gunshot wound, in a crashed car in a ravine). This is just the setup--the rest of the book is about her gradually regaining her memory of how she ended up in that ravine. And, oh yeah, what happened to baby Mia, too.
There are several tedious passages where the mom is trying to convince someone of something, repeating the same thing and getting the same response, and repeating it again. And again. And then again. In other equally tedious passages, the author was fond of having a character ask the mom a question, and then laboriously detailing the mom's thoughts before she responds, or having her look around a location and describe it in some detail, or otherwise postponing her answer. Pacing, anyone?
Worst of all was a plot point that was just ridiculous--it turned out that the mom had a lengthy encounter with police in the area where she was found in the ravine, and since once she was found her case was supposed to be all over the Internet and the news, the police should have made the connection--and thereby dissipated some of the mystery--but inexplicably didn't. It just left me shaking my head in annoyance.
I am really glad I didn't pay for this but got it from the library.
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