X-Men

As a fan of Marvel and it's large cast of superhero characters, I was looking forward to this. Growing up I was a bigger fan of the X-Men than the Avengers characters. Stuart Moore does a fantastic job bringing this story to life. I had such a great time listening to the audiobook. Moore is such an amazing talent with a long history of writing amazing stories for some of my favorite Marvel characters like Wolverine and Deadpool.

I was a big fan of the X-Men movies when they first came out. I will admit that towards the end, some of those movies were a bit of a let down so it is very refreshing to be able to experience a well written story that has a solid dynamic between characters. The only thing I wish was better was the choice for narration. Nancy Wu does a good job but I just found her read to be a bit flat. I think some more life and excitement in the narration could have made this a better audiobook in my opinion.

I would like to thank Stuart Moore, Nancy Wu, Dreamscape Media and NetGalley for providing me an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

hough I've been wanting to read this book for a while, it was a bit of a letdown, if I'm being honest. I saw what it was trying to do with having Jean feel stifled by everyone in her life and then reclaiming herself, but it was honestly felt so messy and back and forth. Jean was evil and then she was good and then she was evil and then she was good? I needed an actual progression of her going from goodness into the darkness. I needed to see that development instead of getting hints of it and then pulling back again. Her whole character arc over the course of this book was just a mess and could have been handled a lot better.

My favorite character in this book was Kitty Pryde, and when she was such a small character and wasn't around all that often, that's saying a lot about how well this book grasped my attention. I did really like Logan's characterization as well, and loved addressing how everyone always expects him to do the hard things, but how he's actually the most good and loyal member of the team, how even though everyone always looks down on him, he is actually better than all of them. Also, Piotr was just my fave, the sweetie.

I thought the narrator did a really good job giving a voice to all these iconic characters and really helped me get through this book.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for allowing me to listen to this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

The Phoenix Saga is one of my favorite X-Men storylines but this adaptation really fell flat for me. As other reviewers mentioned there was a tug of war with Jean Grey as a character that made it hard for me to get a read on her or really connect with her as a character.

As far as the audiobook the narration was great and as someone that speeds up their audiobooks, I had to test that with this one and it was extremely frustrating because the narration was clipped and you lost a good chunk of the story if you did listen to it on 2x-3x speed. This might be an issue with the NetGalley software or just an issue with the actual narration, there's no way for me to know for sure, but it was irritating.

At this point I do feel like I would have enjoyed the story more if I did read it physically.