DODGER

The setting is old London in the reign of Victoria. And our hero is 17-year-old Dodger. Dodger is a “tosher,” a boy who makes a meager living roaming the sewers under London’s streets searching for coins and treasures. One rain-soaked night he rescues a mysterious young woman from the clutches of deadly thugs. With the help of historical figures such as Charles Dickens and Benjamin Disraeli, the horse-drawn, gas-lit world of early Victorian London opens up to the listener. As always, longtime Pratchett narrator Stephen Briggs accentuates the tongue-turning phrases, gentle humor, and wide-eyed wonder of Pratchett’s writing. Pratchett appropriately calls this departure from his widely popular Discworld series a historical fantasy that mixes the oftentimes bleak facts of orphans and child labor with the magic of storybook endings. Briggs’s voice reflects this literary hybrid perfectly. B.P. 2013 Audies Finalist, SYNC 2015 © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine [Published: OCTOBER 2012]