I was sitting in the waiting room at my audiologist's office — annual hearing aid calibration, the kind of appointment where you show up early and then just... sit — when I hit play on Alchemy of Secrets. German-language audiobook. Stephanie Garber's adult debut. Lena Tiemann narrating. My German is functional enough from consulting work with a Berlin-based publisher, and I wanted to hear how Garber's signature atmospheric style translated both linguistically and aurally. Eleven hours later, I have thoughts.
Hollywood Haunts Through a German Lens
Here's what grabbed me first: the premise is genuinely clever. Holland St. James, a student with a tragic past, takes a folklore course in an old cinema — Folklore 517: Local Legends and Urban Myths — taught by a woman everyone just calls "die Professorin." The class explores whether infamous Hollywood deaths were actually murders committed by the devil himself. That setup? Chef's kiss. Garber stacking LA glamour against literal demonic folklore is the kind of genre mashup I live for. The old Hollywood mythology — a haunted hotel bar where the devil hangs out, a man you can call to learn when you'll die — it's got this Chinatown-meets-dark-fairy-tale energy that I genuinely haven't encountered in this exact configuration before.
But here's where the listener consensus and my own experience start to overlap: the pacing. Multiple listeners reported zoning out during the narration, and I felt that pull too. Not because Tiemann is bad — she's competent, her diction is clean, her German is precise — but because she reads this like literary fiction when the material is begging for something more theatrical. Garber writes magic like it's sensory overload. The descriptions of enchantment, the shifting reality around Holland, the tension between these two dangerous men — all of that needs a narrator who leans into the drama. Tiemann stays measured. Controlled. Clarity over speed — always, that's my rule — but clarity without emotional risk is just... reading aloud.
As a hard-of-hearing listener this hit different because I depend on vocal texture to distinguish emotional registers. When a narrator stays in one gear for eleven hours, I lose the thread. Not the words — the feeling. And with Garber's writing, feeling IS the point.
The Caraval Question Nobody Wants to Ask
Some readers called this out directly: Alchemy of Secrets reads like her YA work wearing an adult costume. And yeah, I see it. The romantic tension between Holland and these two mysterious men has the same push-pull dynamic as Caraval and the Once Upon a Broken Heart series. The magic system — if you can call it that — operates on the same dreamy, almost impressionistic logic. Garber describes magic beautifully. She always has. But "adult debut" implies some kind of evolution, and I kept waiting for the story to go somewhere her YA books wouldn't.
The twists, though — credit where it's due — some of those landed. The listener who called them "unexpected" wasn't wrong. There's a mid-book revelation about the folklore course itself that reframed everything I thought I understood about die Professorin's motives. That's Garber at her best: she builds these ornate boxes and then shows you they open from the inside. Age of Legend pulls off something structurally similar — ornate setup, slow-burn reveals — but its narrator understood that the silences between plot points are where tension lives, not where it dies.
But the in-between stretches? The connective tissue between reveals? That's where eleven hours starts to feel like fifteen. A missed opportunity for tone shift — Tiemann could've used the quieter passages to build dread (the content warnings for violence and death suggest the material supports it), but instead those sections just... flatten.
Who Should Listen (And Who Should Skip)
If you loved Caraval's aesthetic and want that same atmospheric intoxication set against an LA backdrop, you'll probably enjoy this. The worldbuilding is lush in a specifically Garber way — not hard magic systems, but vibes so thick you could cut them. Skip this one if you're a multitask listener — this audiobook will punish you. It demands focus, and then doesn't always reward that focus consistently. That's a rough contract. Also skip if you're coming in expecting a clear break from Garber's YA voice; you won't find it here.
For the German-language edition specifically: Tiemann's narration is professional and clear. The translation (by Diana Bürgel) reads smoothly in audio — no awkward constructions that tripped me up. But the performance only feels layered in spots. You get flashes of what this could be — Holland's grief, her stubborn determination — and then it settles back to baseline.
Accessibility-wise: caption sync was perfect on my platform, which matters more than people realize for an eleven-hour listen. No audio artifacts, no volume inconsistencies. The production is clean. I just wanted the performance to match the ambition of Garber's world.
The Audiologist Called My Name Three Times
I was deep in a passage about the haunted hotel bar when the receptionist finally tapped my shoulder. That's the paradox of this audiobook — it can genuinely absorb you in moments, then let you drift. Garber's imagination is not the problem. The execution in audio form just doesn't fully deliver on what's clearly a wild, dark, romantic premise. I'd be curious to hear this with a narrator who performs rather than presents. Because the bones of this story? They deserve it.
