Outside of a Dog: Kate Nepveu's Book Log

After a long hiatus, I resumed listening to the Aubrey-Maturin series with The Truelove. This was originally published as Clarissa Oakes, and with good reason: she is a Botany Bay convict smuggled aboard the Surprise by a midshipman, and the turmoil she causes in the ship is the subject of the vast majority of the book.

It's always lovely to hear Patrick Tull's deep growly comfortable voice, but I was disappointed to feel that he didn't do justice to one big important speech. I was also disappointed in the book itself, not because much of it was tense in the unhappy-ship way, but because it felt like it was built around an artifice. I think this is the first time I've had this reaction to one of O'Brian's books, and I hope it doesn't signal a decline in the series, here on the fifteenth of twenty complete books.