Mindtouch

By: M.C.A. Hogarth

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Seersana University is worlds-renowned for its xenopsychology program, producing the Alliance's finest therapists, psychiatric nurses and alien researchers. When Jahir, one of the rare and reclusive Eldritch espers, arrives on campus, he's unprepared for the challenges of a vast and multicultural society... but fortunately, second-year student Vasiht'h is willing to take him under his wing. Will the two win past their troubles and doubts and see the potential for a once-in-a-lifetime partnership? Book 1 of the Dreamhealers Duology.

Love this series

I love this series and would love to see the rest of them as audiobooks. I admit I was skeptical about the virtual voice. It wasn’t bad. Nothing will replace a real actor.

Moving and depth of characters

While the narrative voice maybe could have used slight more inflection but that might improve with future AI, I had already read this once on kindle so hearing it while reading along parts of it, I had forgotten some of the depth of description and character involved… there is some level of fanciful that leaves me with the fluff of unbelievable but the some parts of the characters, their feelings, their loss and gain and this is my second round after I have suffered much loss and healed in my own therapy.. this had become a part of me finally releasing some of my own pain and emotions..
now I must re read/listen to the entire set of stories again… and buy more Kleenex

A great story with some passable narration

So this story is a great slice of life in a university setting. Jahir is basically a space-elf who reads the minds of anybody who he touches, and Vasiht'h is a second-year furry-centaur alien who he meets at the university. The university feels like a real place, and a lot of work was put into the world-building here, the author has made a very detailed universe here that we're only seeing parts of. The story isn't super high stakes, but it more like (post-grad) university life, with study, choosing a research topic, friends, and some heavier elements as they volunteer at a children's hospital.

Some of the book reviews have described this as an "asexual romance" which is accurate it fits a lot of the beats of romance with the same kind of "meet cute", characters getting to know each other, and then getting entwined into each others lives. It's written quite well, and it's a interesting dynamic. This is a duology so some major plot threads aren't resolved until the second book.

The Narration here is "Virtual Voice" which means it's an AI generated voice used to narrate the book. It's much better than any other AI voice generation I've heard but it's still AI. it does a good job of pronouncing the English words, but has some issues with the alien names and words, As an option to allow a very low-priced audiobook that wouldn't have gotten made otherwise I say it's great. If you compare it to a real human narrator it falls very flat, and obviously doesn't have any of the context to know when something should by happy, or sad, or loud or quiet. It's better than nothing, and I appreciate the author giving us the option of having an audiobook for this.