Review: Do What Godmother Says

Do What Godmother Says by L.S. Stratton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Narrated by Aure Nash, York Whitaker
Presented by Dreamscape Media

A slow start, but otherwise this was rather entertaining.

I enjoyed the dual timelines (not the narration of dual timelines, but I'll get to that later) and our two protagonists. I really loved Estelle - she seemed so switched on and I was quite sad for how things went down for her. Shanice bothered me a little, but I think a bit of that was to do with the narration. She's a strong character but I thought she was a little dense at times.

The narration was a real pain for me. I loved Estelle's narration - the voice was easy to listen to, it was expressive, and it was easy to tell characters apart. However, the narrator for Shanice was awful. She paused in weird places, added emphasis in strange spots, and often the way she expressed the words didn't match up with what the words were actually saying. She read slowly, with many pauses, and unfortunately had a slight speech impediment that became quite irritating to me by the end. I feel like a d*ck for mentioning it because it's not something I'd normally care about, but along with everything else from this narrator it just ended up pulling me out of the story.

I listened to Estelle's parts at 1.5x speed, but had to bump Shanice's parts up to x2. That was incredibly annoying, especially when my hands were busy with other tasks.

The story itself, though, was really fun. There's 'Godmother', who is the quietly menacing patron that is supposed to be looking after Estelle but is quite clearly swindling everyone. Both girls became acquainted with new fellas and I didn't really like either of them, but I also tuned out the relationship bits a little so that's probably on me. I was sucked into the mystery of what had happened to Estelle and how the painting came to be in Shanice's family.

The atmosphere is sufficiently creepy, and this progresses along with the story, leading to some decent chills towards the end. The historical parts shed some decent light on treatment of black women at this time.

I found the pacing a bit off, and my mind did wander at times. But I did enjoy the mystery and atmosphere.

An interesting, quietly creepy story that kept me entertained throughout.

With thanks to NetGalley for an audio ARC

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