Snakes and Earrings

If a 19-year-old woman's blog were narrated by her friend and that blog were laden with ennui, deviant sex, low self-esteem, and occasional flashes of poetry, you would be listening to something like SNAKES AND EARRINGS. Dana Shiraki's dispassionate voice plods through the prose while the story brings listeners ever deeper into a self-destructive, ugly, and self-indulgent life. Listeners may recoil or simply be bored by the lurid details. This is a lowbrow attempt at a modern STORY OF O, and it fails as an audiobook, except perhaps in titillating people too young to get their own tattoos, piercings, body mutilation, and random sex. Overall, an audio nightmare. D.J.B. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine