Diana did a great job. Very touching at times and funny. If we had unlimited studio time and if she was staying longer, I would have broken this up into shorter days - not everything is perfect because we had to keep moving on, but it's all in the ballpark, the characters are really well delineated and the engineer got teary-eyed at the end of part one (he had no idea what the book was about and certainly has no idea where it's going). Listening to it read aloud, I am just so proud of this book - it achieves everything I wanted it, too, and while perhaps it's not going to be to everyone's liking, it is certainly to MY liking and I believe with all my heart that somewhere down the line this will rank very highly in my output. Mostly the responses to this one have been hugely to my liking, and while I feel a couple of reactions were lukewarm, so many things can color the reading of a book - what kind of day the reader has had, mood, many things - I know that's been the case with me. Anyway, on to part two tomorrow. I must say, it's a little daunting to do 118 pages in four hours and the fact is we didn't - we went over by thirty minutes, but twenty of those were a break where our engineer was doing some editing of the first two sections of part one - after that, we did no editing and just plowed on, but tomorrow we won't edit until we're actually done.
