Powerless (Full-Cast Dramatized Adaptation), by Lauren Roberts | Free Audiobook
She pretends to have a power, and the prince who hunts the powerless
In the kingdom of Ilya, ability is citizenship. The Plague handed out powers to the survivors and left everyone else Ordinary, and the crown's solution was to banish the leftovers, which makes Paedyn Gray a criminal twice over: once for having nothing, and again for stealing to eat. Her defence is a performance. She passes herself off as a Psychic in the capital, reading people in a city where being read is a skill the Elites respect, and it works until it stops working.
The complication is a prince whose entire job is hunting exactly what she is pretending to be, and who sees through her faster than he should. What follows is a story built on two people lying to each other for very good reasons, in a court where a single careless sentence is fatal, and on the question of what a kingdom looks like when the people it exiled are the ones keeping it alive.
I have listened to enough dramatized editions to be sceptical of them, because half the time the sound design is doing the work a narrator should be doing. This one earns it. Fourteen voices, music and a production that knows when to shut up, and the result is a sixteen hour listen that feels considerably shorter. Lauren Roberts herself is in the cast, which usually signals trouble, and here it does not: the ensemble holds together and nobody is performing for the back row. I started it on a rainy Tuesday and finished it inside three days, which for a book this size is my version of a compliment.
The premise is the part that works best, and the production lets it breathe. Ilya's bargain is genuinely nasty when you look at it directly: powers were a gift from a plague, the crown turned the ones who did not receive them into an underclass, and Paedyn has spent years surviving inside that logic by lying about which group she belongs to. A story about a girl performing a power she does not have is a gift to a full-cast adaptation, because every conversation carries a second layer of tension that a single narrator has to work much harder to suggest.
The two leads are cast well. The prince's pursuit of her is the engine, and the scenes where he half-knows and she half-trusts are the best in the book, with the sound design dropping away at exactly the right moments instead of hammering every emotional beat. The Trial sections, which could have been an effects showcase, are handled with restraint and are the better for it.
Now the criticism, and it is the one that follows this book around: the repetition. It has been said by a lot of its audience since the novel came out, in harder words than I will use here, that the dialogue and the scenes go around the same loop more than they need to, and that the middle of the book is slow. In a dramatized adaptation that problem gets louder rather than quieter, because you cannot skim repeated conversation when two actors are performing every syllable of it. There is a stretch of several hours in the middle where the two of them have some version of the same standoff, and by the third or fourth iteration I was noticing the structure instead of the story, which is the one thing a production this good should not let me do.
I would not go as far as the listeners who call the book dull, because the central relationship has real charge and the world is built with more care than the comparisons suggest. But the pacing complaint is fair and it costs this edition something, precisely because the cast is committed enough to make every repeated exchange feel like it deserves your full attention.
Sixteen hours and forty-two minutes is a big commitment and the production carries it, with the chapters well shaped for stopping and the music used sparingly enough that it never becomes wallpaper. If you have read the novel and bounced off it, this is a genuinely different experience and worth trying. If you have never read it and want the version with the most atmosphere, start here, then go back to the standard edition for the second book while you wait for its adaptation.
For more of the same treatment, Threshing Day (Dramatized Adaptation) is the closest thing in scale in this catalogue, and Iron Flame (Dramatized Adaptation) is the other big-cast fantasy production worth sixteen hours of anyone's year.
Powerless is the story of Paedyn Gray, who has no power in a kingdom where having one is the price of belonging, and who survives by passing herself off as a Psychic among the Elites who would banish her. This is the full-cast dramatized edition: fourteen actors, music and sound design, 16 hrs and 42 mins.
It is the first book of the Powerless trilogy and the natural place to start, in either this edition or the standard one. With the free listening trial you spend the credit on whichever title you like, this one included, and you can cancel in a couple of clicks if the dramatized format turns out not to be what you want on the train.
Whatever you pick up during the trial stays in your library afterwards, even if you stop, so a sixteen hour production is an excellent way to spend it. Playback speed, a sleep timer and resuming exactly where you left off all come as standard. All that is left is to press play and let fourteen voices do the work.
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