Unabridged Audiobook
Time Is a Fine White Lie is a surreal experience. These seven short stories sometimes felt disjointed and sometimes felt like they were tethered together in the astral plane. I’m pretty sure I don’t get it and yet I still liked it. My favorite was the satire about a group of injured people seeking medical assistance. Society isn’t interested in helping them. In fact, they are seen as being disruptive and unseemly, bleeding all over the place and making a mess. I felt it had a solid footing in our modern world where health care shouldn’t be such a battle to obtain. Of course it had to get weird at the end with rubbing food on people…. but, hey, this story wouldn’t deserve to be in this collection if it wasn’t odd. There was one story about an adult woman finding her mother dead, perhaps from an overdose, at home. She looses it mentally, fleeing from the loss. I found this story a little slow but the ending really nailed it, making the whole of it a rather poignant tale. The collection takes a little odd twist at the end with a tale of a guy at a bar telepathically chatting with the bartender, who is actually just a voluntary vessel for some spiritually gifted traveler from some far off place. The tale pulls in a dead rock star and some higher spiritual being who I will call the Navel (simply because it gives me a giggle and also because I think anyone holding great power needs to remind themselves to be humble from time to time). It was a weird trip. I don’t really get it and I’m not sure I care but it was still entertaining. Maybe I am simple spiritually immature as was the volunteer bartender body. 3.5/5 stars. The Narration: Several narrators had a hand in this weird collection: Greg Chun, Andrew Weiss, Aaron Goodson, Abby Trott, Karen Strassman, Kathleen France, P.J. Ochlan, Ritesh Rajan, Todd Haberkorn. I don’t know who did what but for the most part, they were all good fits for this project. A few of the narrations felt a bit slow and the platform I listened on (Aquariphone) didn’t have the option to adjust playback speed. So those stories felt like they dragged a bit. That one story with the telepathic communication attempted to modify the volumes to indicate telepathy was in play but it just came out weird on my laptop speakers. I think just going with sotto voce would have worked better. Other than that, a solid performance. 4.5/5 stars. I received this audiobook as part of my participation in a blog tour with Audiobookworm Promotions. The tour is being sponsored by William Steffey. The gifting of this audiobook did not affect my opinion of it.
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