✍️ Written by: Neil Gaiman & Dirk Maggs
🏷️ Genre: Sci-fi / fantasy
🗓️ Published: 22 September 2021
📄 Pages: 0
🧐 My rating: ★★★☆☆ (3 stars)
Enter the Dreaming again as the blockbuster audio adaptation of “the greatest epic in the history of comic books” continues in The Sandman: Act II. James McAvoy returns to voice Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams, in this sequel to the number-one New York Times audio best seller. Journey into a world of myths, imagination, and terror based on the best-selling DC comic books and graphic novels written by Neil Gaiman (returning as the Narrator), and lose yourself in another groundbreaking, immersive drama adapted and directed by the award-winning audio master Dirk Maggs.
In the absolutely packed Act II, the dark fantasy resumes and the Sandman expands into the French Revolution, ancient Rome, 19th-century San Francisco, eighth-century Baghdad, and beyond. New and familiar characters abound, voiced by a bright mix of performers, including Kat Dennings, Regé-Jean Page, Emma Corrin, Michael Sheen, Kristen Schaal, Brian Cox, John Lithgow, Jeffrey Wright, and so many more, including fan-favorite narrators Simon Vance and Ray Porter.
The Sandman: Act II really didn't hit the mark for me. When sharing my thoughts on Act I, I said:
What I did find weird, was that although there was a story throughout the book, it wasn't at the forefront. Instead, each chapter is it's own short story, some of which are tenuously linked, whereas others appear to be completely unrelated to one another.
This felt amplified 10-fold for this book. Every chapter feels like a short story of its own. In Act I we follow Morpheus getting all his gear back after being captures, but in this book the chapters feel totally unrelated.
Because of this I came away feeling unsatisfied. I get that this is based on comic books, so each comic is likely to have it's own short story (I don't know, I've never read a comic) but this collection of short stories wasn't that enjoyable for me.
As with Act I, the production quality is excellent, and most of the voice acting is great too. Albeit with one or two abysmal voice actors. The production quality is the only thing that pushed this from 2 stars, to 3.
I think I'm done with The Sandman at this point; I can't see myself wasting Audible credits on the rest of the series.
I entered "0" for the pages field above. Because it's an audiobook, it doesn't have pages. It's 13 hours and 47 minutes long though.
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