Sylvia's Lovers

(5 stars)

Abigail

Elizabeth Gaskell is so talented at creating complicated characters who you both love and hate. Her stories have the way of appealing to such common experiences as loss and confusion and relationships of families, including the way that the feelings inthese things change with passing time. Sylvia’s Lovers is a sad story in the opinions of modern readers but when compared to her peers like Dickens, are perfectly normal in their events. Having just read her other books, this is far more heart wrenching but just as splendidly written.

Quite a story - Talented author

(5 stars)

aae

Interesting, seems true to life but sad story. Readers thank you for reading with clarity and accents that bring the story alive.

wonderful twisted tale of love

(5 stars)

jaded_grl

first let me praise the readers. i often avoid books on librivox when each chapter is read by a different person. but many of the readers for this book did a fine job! only a few chapters had readers that only did a so-so job, sadly the last chapter was one of those readers and if kind of lost all the emotion because the character voices she used were awkward. but overall good audio and recommended! the story follows a girls in her early teens through her early twenties. her love of a sailor, and her cousins love for her, the twists and turns that leave so many unhappy in/out of love. the story is not overly sappy, so i think many men will enjoy it just as much as women. but the down side was that sin and justice were misused to explain the ending. i find some faults with the way the author twisted the bible, but in all the the characters followed the bibles course for what happens when serious problems arise in marriage - but events of life are not punishments by god. romans6:23 death itself is punishment

Unrequited Love

(5 stars)

jbrown

Sylvia's Lovers is an excellent story and the narrators do it justice. As another reviewer stated I too do not like narration by different readers in the same book but it was very well done here. Highly enjoyable and the story, which lagged at first, became so very engaging! Lost a few nights of sleep because I could not stop listening and wanted to know what happened next. Thank you LibriVox and especially the narrators.

Fine story, good enough recording

(4 stars)

Jill

It was a bit distracting to have changing narrators, but as it is a free copy I don't feel it is really my place to complain and I followed along just fine. As for the story, not my favorite, but it's the kind of story I suspect could grow on me over time and I did enjoy it more than I thought I was going to at first.

A mixed pleasure

(3 stars)

Susan Lewis

i am so grateful to the volunteers who read for us....thank you all. this story, very much of a bygone era, would have benefited from having a single reader and my sympathies go to those trying an accent which I would never have been able to attain. so a mixed experience but one which pays off if one sticks with it.

(3 stars)

Sea ForCinnamon

I love the period detail in Elizabeth Gaskell's work, and I was becoming interested in this story. Gaskell wrote in a vernacular that readers unfamiliar with regional accents have to guess at. I had to give up when I reached the chapter where the reader sounds like the Swedish cook from the Muppets. I'm going to look for another source for this book.

Long but lovely

(4 stars)

Anna

A very descriptive novel with a lot of personal growth and character development. An abrupt ending without a great deal of closure was such a shame to such a drawn out novel but I really enjoyed listening to this book ❤️