The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary: Audiobook review

I almost gave up on this audiobook, but I’m glad I didn’t!

I really enjoyed the story in the end. 🤩🤩

TL;DR: if all book format options are open to you, opt for this one in print/ebook form.

Positives:

• A great cast of characters. I liked the friendship groups around both the male and female leads.
• You expect ‘enemies to lovers’, but there are swerves and different layers that keep this narrative from being too obvious.
• A good balance of serious and light-hearted.
• A satisfying conclusion that fits with the genre.

Reasons I nearly gave up:

• When you have a dual POV narrative (2 x first person) voiced by two narrators, and a side character appears in both POV characters’ stories… well, it means you’re getting two different voices delivering the lines of one character. I’m not sure I’m explaining this very well — it’s been a long day. Let’s try again with more specifics. One example would be that the character of Kay appears both in Leon’s POV chapters and Tiffy’s POV chapters. So you have a situation where a male narrator makes Kay sound one way, and the female narrator makes Kay sound another… I found that kind of jarring.
• When Leon narrates things Tiffy has said, Tiffy comes across as sounding ditzy and infantile. But when you hear Tiffy speaking for herself, she sounds a lot more level-headed. I know this is just one character’s interpretation of another, so that’s okay, and that the audiobook narrator is doing his version of what one character thinks another character sounds like, but it just grated on me that Leon made Tiffy out to be a bit stoopid…
• Ditto for when Leon narrates what the northern bloke, Mr Pryor, says to him while in palliative care. It was that kind of ‘put on’ northern accent that makes northerners sound like they’re pronouncing all their words through Eccles cakes. The same kind of northern accent that characters on kids TV are given that makes them out to be a bit slow on the uptake…

So I think what it boils down to is, on this occasion, I wasn’t keen on the male audiobook narrator. Sorry to say, but it’s true.

To be fair, my disgruntlement didn’t last long because I did get used to it. The jarring lessened as I got more into it and was used to hearing characters be given two voices. And the story was so compelling that I wanted to carry on and find out what happened.

Listening to Flatshare has made me realise that I take stellar audiobook performances for granted. It can’t be easy. There’s a definite art to it. I normally have nothing but praise for narrators’ efforts. But I think the challenge of a dual POV narration was the issue here, more so than the individual qualities of the narrators.

Story: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Performance: ⭐⭐⭐ (I’d say 3.75…)

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