German is the working language of this entire record, and anyone arriving from the English-language series needs to register that before anything else. The description is German, the publisher is HörbucHHamburg HHV GmbH, the narrator credit is a German reader, and four of the five written responses are written in German by buyers in Germany. Thirteen hours and twenty-five minutes of Jennifer L. Armentrout's third Lux novel, prepared for a German audience and released in April 2015. The title field says only Opal, with no subtitle, which is the first of several places where this audiobook's page tells you less than its own review column does.
Where This One Lands
Katy and Daemon have finally closed the distance between them when the book opens, and the blurb is explicit that this is the calm before the storm rather than a resolution. Blake reappears at the door asking for help. Katy does not know whether he can be trusted and helps anyway, because friends are in danger and she will risk her own life for them. What the blurb promises is a plan that brings the truth about the Lux within reach while pushing Katy further from Daemon than she believed possible. That is a clean, confident summary of a middle volume: one revelation gained, one relationship strained, nothing concluded. It is also, on the evidence of the responses, the volume where the series stops holding its central couple apart, which for a readership three books deep is the whole reason to press play.
Two votes are recorded against this title, and the badge above them reads 4.6. No pair of whole-star grades produces 4.6 under any rounding convention in use anywhere, so that average cannot be what it claims to be. Underneath the impossible number, five written responses are visible, each carrying its own grade. The tally and the comments disagree about how many people have spoken here, and the average disagrees with arithmetic. Nothing on the page reconciles either problem, so the score is best treated as decoration rather than as a measurement of how the recording landed.
What Makes Opal Worth Hearing
Merete Brettschneider holds the narrator credit, alone, for thirteen hours and twenty-five minutes. That is a long stretch of first-person young adult narration with a large recurring cast: Katy, Daemon, Blake, Dawson, Beth and the organization the German responses call the VM. A single reader has to keep all of them separable across a volume that assumes you remember the previous two. No cast list, no production note and no sample commentary appears on the page, and none of the five responses says a word about how the reading turned out. For a series this dependent on voice and banter, that is a real blank.
Carlsen turns up in a place it has no business being. One response opens by pasting a small bibliographic block into the review body: the German title given as Opal followed by Schattenglanz, the author's name, an ISBN in the 978-3-551 range, and Carlsen listed as the publisher. That is the print edition's data, sitting inside a review of an audio edition released by a different company entirely. It is also, oddly, more informative than the listing itself, since it supplies the subtitle the title field omits. A reader hunting for the right German volume will find it in a review rather than in the metadata, which is an odd way to run a catalog entry for a book with a fixed place in a numbered series.
What Gives Us Pause
Fans arriving in order will have no trouble. Everyone else should stop and count. This is the third volume, and the blurb opens mid-situation with two characters already bound together and a third already established as untrustworthy. The German responses summarize prior events at length precisely because the book does not: one recaps that Dawson is back but without Beth, that Katy has gained abilities through her connection to Daemon, and that Blake had been lying the whole time. Those recaps are spoilers for the earlier volumes, and they sit in plain view on this page.
Blake is the engine of the plot and the source of its tension, according to every response that describes the story. The German entries agree that this installment trades action for romance compared with the two before it, with one saying plainly that the earlier volumes carried a little more of it and that the love story takes up noticeably more room here. That is a useful warning in either direction. Readers who came for the alien-invasion machinery will find less of it. Readers who came for Katy and Daemon will find this the volume that finally gives them time together.
Whitney, writing in English from the United States, sits at the top of a column that is otherwise entirely German, and calls this the third book in the Lux series. The listing calls the series Obsidian and numbers this as three. A German response calls it the third part of the Obsidian Reihe. Both names are correct in their own markets and the page picks one without explaining the other, which is how a buyer ends up searching the wrong term. Three of the four German entries also stop in the middle of a clause, so the most detailed accounts here are unfinished.
Should You Listen to Opal?
Listeners who read German comfortably and have already finished the first two volumes are the audience this edition was made for, and it serves them well: a long running time, a single reader, and a story that finally pays off a romance two books in the making. Anyone who followed the series in German print and wants to continue by ear will find the same translation lineage the reviews keep referring to. The emoji-headed response and the bibliographic paste alike suggest a devoted readership that documents its own reading carefully. That readership is worth trusting on the story, since several of them summarize the plot in more detail than the publisher does, even if none of them mentions the recording at all.
This is the wrong purchase for anyone expecting English, and the page does not warn you in English that it is German. It is also the wrong place to begin the series, since the first paragraph of the blurb assumes a relationship and a betrayal you have not seen yet. If your German is comfortable and volumes one and two are behind you, thirteen hours and twenty-five minutes with this cast is exactly what it promises to be.
A Few Questions About Opal
Is the Opal audiobook in German or English?
German throughout. The description, the publisher HörbucHHamburg HHV GmbH and the narrator credit all point the same way, and four of the five written responses come from buyers in Germany writing in German. Only the interface language and one American response are in English, which is easy to misread while browsing.
Where does Opal fall in the series and can I start here?
Third, and no. The listing numbers it as volume three of Obsidian, one response calls it the third book of the Lux series, and another calls it the third part of the Obsidian Reihe. The blurb opens with a relationship and a betrayal already established across the two earlier volumes.
Why does this audiobook show 4.6 stars from two votes?
It should not be able to. Two whole-star grades cannot average to 4.6 under any rounding rule, and five written responses sit below a counter that says two people voted. Both figures on that badge are unreliable, so read the written comments and disregard the number entirely.
Why does one review list an ISBN and the publisher Carlsen?
A reviewer pasted the print edition's bibliographic block into the body: title, author, an ISBN and Carlsen as publisher. None of that describes this recording, which came from a different company. It does supply the German subtitle Schattenglanz, which the audiobook's own title field leaves out.
