I've read, reviewed and I own all the books in this series, but I had heard somewhere in one of my groups that the narration for these books was particularly well done and since I'm always looking for something to listen to (my drives are not short ones) I decided to give the first book in the series a try. Which led me to immediately purchasing every book in the series on audio. At full price.
Xe Sands is brilliant. Absolutely freaking brilliant at narration. I've heard some really well narrated books previously, but she's ruined them all for me. Everyone else now sounds like Clint Eastwood in drag. By this I do not mean to infer that narrators everywhere have OD'd on testosterone supplements, but so many of them now sound to me as though they are mimicking his style of talking. I don't know how to explain it beyond that. Choppy, overly grave, um... yeah, let's go with choppy.
Xe narrates these books just the way you'd imagine real people talking. She's not reading a book to you, she's living the story as she speaks it. Lily could be sitting next to me in the car telling me all about her latest adventures and it would sound exactly the same way (plus, she could totally use her magic to fix the damn traffic!). Male voices are done without the male characters sounding like they'd just been kicked and she's really adept at making one male character sound different from the next. In fact her overall range of voice characterisations is quite broad. Happy trails!