Muted by Tami Charles

 

Welcome Back, Booklovers! So I listened to this audiobook yesterday as it's a fairly short audiobook and I don't have a lot of experience with novels in verse so I wanted to try another one. Plus one of the unique things this audiobook boasted was original music. I have previously read a Tami Charles book and while this is much different from that one I was looking forward to it. Especially since she narrates the audiobook.

Muted  follows the journey of seventeen-year-old Denver who is ready for R&B stardom and gets the chance to join Sean "Mercury" Ellis on tour and become his protégé. While Denver and her friend Dali are instantly entranced by the studio time and wild parties, their friend Shak finds Merc creepy and is suspicious. Denver and Dali soon run off despite their parent's skepticism and soon find that Merc's world isn't all glitz and glamor. It also is rigorous fitness routines, strict diets, creating a certain image, blatant favoritism, and abuse.

The narration is a strong point that made it easy for me to listen to this story in one day. Tami Charles brings enough flavor that I can easily picture these girls. As far as the original songs while Tami Charles' has a good voice the audio in those sections sounds rough especially compared to the rest of her narration. It kind of sounded like those pieces were done on an old recorder. The production team dropped the ball in those parts.

This story is so fast-paced that I find you don't really get the chance to reflect about what is going on with Denver and these girls.  Like something majorly scary would happen and then we'd be right back to talk about Denver's diet which basically consists of water and air towards the end. And I think that takes away some of the impact and connection for me. And since this audiobook is split into 4 parts instead of chapters it's not easy for me to just go back listen to a section. 

I also don't feel like we had enough background about her family life to understand how she got sucked into this environment. The main conflict between Denver and her parents seems to be that they're strict Haitians that want her to go to college. Plenty of Caribbean parents are like that. I don't think that only makes girls go run to predators. Sure she had some body images issues as well but it's not like he was telling her that he was giving her a self-esteem boost either.

Also this will be inevitably compared to Grown by Tiffany D Jackson which released last year due to the similar premises. Which while it's important to tell these stories about predators this was way too ripped from the headlines. To the point where I'm like this is just the R Kelly story so I should just go finishing watching Surviving R Kelly instead. Plus that story is still so fresh. I recall just a few years ago when the stories about R Kelly and those girls he was holding hostage were in the headlines on almost a daily basis and people were trying to make excuses about how those were consenting young women because they refused to see past the music.

The only thing that really surprised me was the ending but even that was rushed and didn't have the full impact it could've. Overall it was a little too much like a simplified version of a known story to be impactful.