Miss Plum and Miss Penny

By: Dorothy Evelyn Smith

Narrated by: Mary Sarah

"I do not anticipate for one moment that Miss Plum has been murdered, though I should have some slight sympathy with her assassin if she had."

Miss Penny is a middle-aged spinster living a cheerful, contented life, complete with perfect housekeeper, in an idyllic English village. Her romantic life consists of an annual Christmas card from her old flame George, and her social swirl involves Stanley, a prissy neighbor who keeps her in mind for a future wife, and Hubert, a neurotic widowed priest with an alienated son.

Into this stable life comes Miss Plum, whom Miss Penny saves from drowning herself in a duck pond and takes into her quiet, orderly home. The villagers embrace the perpetually weepy, forlorn young woman - at first. But soon her welcome wears thin. With joyfully dark comedy, hilariously odd locals, and an unexpected reappearance from long-lost George, Dorothy Evelyn Smith brilliantly evokes the havoc wreaked by social niceties, misplaced sympathies, and keeping up appearances - not to mention the urge to defend one's peaceful existence!

©1959 Dorothy Evelyn Smith; Introduction copyright 2020 by Elizabeth Crawford (P)2021 Tantor

The story is okay but the narration is awful

I don’t know who selected this narrator, but she is so affected and sing song that it’s very hard to follow the story. A must miss.

Awful narration

I've read this book (paperback) a few times in recent years, and enjoyed it. But the narrator is too difficult to make this audio book enjoyable. 😳

She has a languid, bored, affected tone. And there's an odd lisp, where words that end in a "t" or "d" seem to have a "th" sound. It's very distracting, and I spent too much time trying to listen for it and understand what she was doing.

Listened a couple of times, but haven't made it past an hour or so. I won't be buying it; I only listened because I saw it in the Plus catalog.

Yikes

Good store, but the narration is truly hard to listen to. Looks like someone would have caught this!

Shockingly bad narration

The narrator’s affectations and sometimes almost mocking tone make this a difficult book to listen to.