Thuvia, Maid of Mars

Burroughs loved creating new words to evoke the strangeness of his fictional worlds. Some can barely be pronounced, but Raymond Todd delivers them easily. Likewise, the novel's dialogue is stiff and marked by the melodramatic conventions of the period, but Todd does the best job possible with it, humanizing it when he can, and declaiming in full oratorical fashion when it's called for. Todd's delivery is well paced, shifting cadence to follow Burroughs's shifts from war to philosophy. And THUVIA is full of adventure--telepathic warriors, giant apes, true love, and more. All of that said, this book will attract relatively few listeners, being fourth in a series and marked by some truly bad prose. G.T.B. (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine