Amerika

By: Paul Lally

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

It’s December 8, 1941…The day after Pearl Harbor…The Nazis have the A-bomb…We don’t. Washington D.C. and Manhattan disappear beneath nuclear mushroom clouds. Stripped of its congress, judicial and executive branches, the United States is a fractured, frantic shell of its former self; each state, a world unto its own. Germany’s threat of further attacks on major American cities like Chicago, Miami and Pittsburgh compels Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, sole survivor of the executive branch and now president, to bend to Hitler’s demand of neutrality. Powerless and impotent, America watches from the sidelines while Europe and Asia go up in flames. In search of a cause to unite America once again as a nation, the “Sons of Liberty,” a distant echo of our nation’s revolutionary war volunteers, secretly band together again, in the South this time, led by take-no-prisoners, General George S. Patton himself. And in doing so, he calls upon a group of ordinary citizens, including ex-Pan Am pilot Sam Carter and Hollywood actress Ava James, to embark on a series of missions that, if successful, will deliver America from its darkest hour and set it on a path toward the bright light of victory. The odds are impossible, the missions dangerous, and with an unknown spy in their midst threatening to wreck their intricate plans, everything seems doomed from the start as they struggle to bring America back into the fight for liberty and justice for all.

The narrator was great!

I liked the book and the reader. The book was non-stop action. If they can get a narrator like that to do other books, that would be awesome!

I did not like the AI reading

I liked the premise of the story, however it didn’t play out to its fullest potential. That said, as a pilot, I did enjoy the time spent on aviation and specifically the Boeing 314.

As for the AI reading, when I listened to a sample, it sounded good enough to at least give it a try. While listening, I was disappointed. It’s a male voice, and when narrating a female, the voice stayed the same. For that matter, there was absolutely no variation from character to character. It was difficult to follow along during a conversation. Some words were mis pronounced. For example, a WW2 German fighter airplane is an ME 102 (pronounced em ee). The AI pronounced it “me 102”. I much prefer a human to read with emotion, dialect, and gender variations.

Horrid Narration

Story is ok, narration is boring and lackluster. Hard to tell which character is talking due to lack of an attempt to use unique voices for even the main characters. How did this guy get a job in narration?