[Quoth]

Now tested a decent spec phone but with only Android 5. Only works with the two playstore downloads:
Android Accessibility Suite on Playstore
Speech Services by Google.
You need to separately download speech packs and do setting in both Apps via Settings, Accessibility. Enable the Read Text switch which puts up a floating bubble controller (Earlier Androids). Later Androids add the stick figure to control bar that replaces touch or physical buttons outside screen on earlier Android.

The Huawei Y6 with Android 5 also has "level of expression" setting in the Google Text to Speech.
Works fine in Lithium. Probably works in everything.
You have not just tap pause, but tap stop/disable to access the main GUI.

On some versions of Android it boxes the word being spoken and on older versions it boxes paragraph.

Maybe someone with a signed in Kindle App on Android can test?