Rating: **** 4 stars

Lian Hearn, read by Jamie Glover and Isla Blair (refers to audio book version)
Grass for his Pillow.
Macmillan, abridged, 4 hrs, 2004.
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The middle of a trilogy often has a sense of bridging the gap in between the two more vital elements of the story - the beginning and its conclusion. Grass for his Pillow suffers slightly from this in that there is a lot of filling in to be done before what one expects to be the dramatic resolution in volume three. But Lian Hearn gets around it surprisingly adeptly by concentrating instead on the development of the characters. This, in turn, makes Grass for his Pillow work especially succesfully on tape. Jamie Glover and Isla Blair read the two voices well, so that Takeo's dilemma as he weighs up the impossible choice he must make between his two lives, one with the Tribe and the other with the Otori, and the equally dangerous game that Kaede must play to protect her future by seeing off suitors while keeping her secret hidden are played out vividly.

Julia Eccleshare