"Now, hundreds of thousands of half-stone soldiers from the ancient past have awakened." That line from the description sold me. An army frozen in stone for fifteen centuries, suddenly lurching back to life? That's horror-adjacent enough that I had to give it a shot, even though Goodkind's Sword of Truth universe has never been my home turf the way Shirley Jackson's haunted houses are.
I was reshelving returns at the library on a quiet Tuesday - and I mean quiet, the kind of afternoon where the fluorescent lights buzzing is the loudest sound in the building - when I started this. Twenty hours. That's a commitment. I figured the siege setting would pair well with being trapped behind the circulation desk with nothing but a cart of overdue fantasies and my earbuds.
Half-Stone Soldiers and Full-Blown Repetition
Here's the thing about Siege of Stone that frustrated me as someone who deeply respects the craft of building dread: the premise is genuinely creepy. An ancient army, partially petrified, crumbling and cracking as they move, led by a general who's been frozen mid-conquest for centuries? That's the kind of body horror meets epic fantasy concept I can get behind. Shift does something similar with its monster mythology and actually follows through on the dread that premise promises. The problem is that Goodkind tells you about it. And then tells you again. And again. The repetitive writing style becomes its own kind of siege - you're trapped inside explanations you've already absorbed chapters ago, waiting for the story to advance past ground it's already covered.
Nicci, Nathan, and Bannon are serviceable leads, but if you're coming in cold without having read the first two Nicci Chronicles entries, you're going to feel like you walked into a conversation that started two hours ago. This is very much a book three. The political machinations inside Ildakar - the freed slaves, the deposed wizards council, the chaos of a power vacuum during an existential military threat - should be riveting. Sometimes it is. But the pacing across twenty hours is uneven enough that I caught myself adjusting my speed more than once.
Christina Traister: Personal but Unpolished
So let's talk about the narrator, because this is where the audiobook experience gets complicated. Christina Traister reads this story like she's telling it to you personally, and there's a warmth to that approach that I genuinely appreciate. When she's in Nicci's headspace - the cold calculation, the former Death's Mistress energy - she commits. That's rare.
But.
The hesitations. I noticed them early and couldn't un-notice them. There are moments scattered throughout where Traister sounds like she's encountering the text for the first time, stumbling slightly over sentence structures before finding her footing. For a twenty-hour listen, that accumulates. It's like a tiny crack in a window - fine at first, but eventually the draft gets to you.
And the male voices. Look, I understand the challenge of a female narrator voicing male characters. Some narrators pull this off brilliantly through tone and cadence shifts rather than pitch drops. Traister's male voices land somewhere between attempted and abandoned - you can hear the effort, but General Utros and Nathan Rahl and Bannon don't sound distinct enough from each other to track in dialogue-heavy scenes without extra concentration. When you're trying to differentiate between an ancient military commander and a young swordsman and they sound roughly the same? That's a problem.
The emotional delivery is her strength. When the stakes are personal - when characters are afraid, desperate, grieving - Traister brings genuine feeling. It's the technical side that needed another pass in the booth.
Who Gets Through the Gate (and Who Gets Turned to Stone)
If you've been with the Nicci Chronicles from Death's Mistress through Shroud of Eternity and you're invested in seeing how this siege resolves - yes, listen to this. You're already in. The narrative payoff requires that investment, and Traister's consistency across the trilogy means you won't be jarred by a narrator switch.
If you're new to Goodkind? Don't start here. Just don't. And if you're someone who gets antsy with repetitive prose in long-form audio, bump the speed to 1.25x. It tightens the pacing without losing comprehension, and honestly, some of those repeated explanations benefit from being moved through faster.
If you scare easily - well, this isn't that kind of book. But half-stone soldiers grinding their way across a battlefield? My podcast listeners would appreciate that image even if the execution doesn't quite reach the horror it's flirting with.
Shelved Under: Ambitious but Overstocked
(Librarian joke. I'm allowed.)
Siege of Stone has a premise that deserved tighter editing and a production that deserved another recording pass. Traister's personal, emotional approach carries the story further than it probably deserves in places, but the hesitations and weak male differentiation keep this from being the definitive way to experience the book. I finished all twenty hours. I don't regret it. But I also don't think I'll revisit it, and for a twenty-hour investment, that says something.
Shirley (my cat) slept through the entire final battle. Make of that what you will.
