Audiobook: Asylum by Madeline Roux

Read by Michael Goldstrom
Duration: 6 hours & 45 minutes

Once you get in, there's no getting out.

For sixteen-year-old Dan Crawford, a summer program for gifted students is the chance of a lifetime. No one else at his high school gets his weird fascinations with history and science, but at the New Hampshire College Prep program, such quirks are all but required.

Dan arrives to find that the usual summer housing has been closed, forcing students to stay in the crumbling Brookline dorm—formerly a psychiatric hospital. As Dan and his new friends Abby and Jordan start exploring Brookline's twisty halls and hidden basement, they uncover disturbing secrets about what really went on here . . . secrets that link Dan and his friends to the asylum's dark past. Because it turns out Brookline was no ordinary psych ward. And there are some secrets that refuse to stay buried.

This mind-bending listening experience blurs the lines between past and present, friendship and obsession, genius and insanity.

Overdrive

My Thoughts: This one is going to be a quick review. The cover hooked me and appeared to be a creepy story. I mean, it's titled Asylum, which that alone was scary enough. Unfortunately, I was not too impressed with this audiobook.

The story could have been promising but the characters destroyed it for me. They were inconsistent and their actions did not make sense. For instance, the main character Dan was an awkward teen who was described as someone who had a hard time socializing and making friends. But all of a sudden he created two best friends within the first hour that he attended the summer program. Huh?

The narrator was a decent reader. He did his best in capturing the characters by modifying his tone of voice and exaggerating all of the important parts. It was too bad that he could not make the characters interesting for me.

As a whole, I was disappointed with this book. The narrator was a good reader and I did stick around to find out how the problem was going to be resolved, but I felt let down at the end. I rate it:

This book counts towards the Audiobook Challenge.