- Narrator: Emma Carey reads her own account across seven and a half hours, and the one reader to mention the recording flags the accent before being cut off
- Subjects: Recovery without restoration, gratitude argued and never assumed, a legal aftermath the copy omits
- Tone: Level and unhurried, argued more often than lyrical
- Bottom line: Worth seven hours for the reasoning behind the recovery, provided you sample the reading first.
Halfway through the only review that says anything at all about this audiobook as an audiobook, the text simply stops. The entry filed under HappyCamper works through the memoir, praises it, then turns: I heard the audio version and that is the one problem with it (for me.) The author read it herself and she is from Australia. She has a very thick Aussy accent and it's one that I f. That is where the body ends. Whatever followed that stranded letter, the one listener willing to discuss the recording never reached the end of the sentence.
Already Paid the Entry Fee for the Position
Emma Carey was twenty when a skydiving accident left her a paraplegic, and the title is literal rather than figurative. What the description takes care to say is that the book is not simply about the fall, or about learning to walk again without ever regaining feeling in her legs. It is about the beliefs and ideas that helped her survive, and about a changed mindset she says she remains proudest of, ahead of the walking. That distinction sets the terms of everything else. A recovery narrative ends when the body does something; this one claims to be about what the mind did instead.
What the copy then does with that claim is ambitious and faintly slippery. It opens on a question about seeing beauty in every part of living, argues that we postpone gratitude until we have the job or the car or the outfit, and proposes changing the mindset instead of the circumstances. Read cold, that is standard wellness rhetoric of the kind you can buy by the yard. Read against the fact that the person making the argument cannot feel her own legs, it becomes much harder to wave away, because she has already paid the entry fee for the position she is defending.
A Court Case That Never Appears in the Copy
Before the accident, by her own account, she was on autopilot. The copy describes a regular young adult who would wake and go about the day without engagement, somebody who would look at a sunset and feel unaffected, somebody who was living but not really alive. That is a severe and unflattering self-portrait to open a memoir with, and it does the structural work the argument needs. Without the before, the after is only a medical story. With it, the accident becomes the hinge of a case, never the subject of one.
Marielle Venrooy's review adds something the description leaves out completely. The entry describes following Emma for years on IG, arriving at the book as an extension of captions that were already insightful, then singles out for praise the honesty about darker moments, particularly regarding the court case. No court case appears anywhere in the publisher's copy. A memoir sold on wonder and appreciation apparently contains a legal aftermath, and the only place a buyer would learn that in advance is a reader's paragraph sitting under the sales pitch.
Seven hours and thirty-five minutes, read by the person it happened to. Self-narration in memoir is common enough that it barely registers as a decision, but here it changes the object. An account of learning to live inside a body that stopped reporting back is a different thing in the voice of the person doing the living, and the listing is plain about the arrangement, since author and narrator are one name. The publisher field reads Wavesound from W. F. Howes Ltd, an imprint credited by way of another imprint, which matters only because it is the sort of detail that makes a catalog entry hard to trace.
A Flagged Obstacle With No Measure Attached
Back to the accent, since it is the only practical warning anybody has offered. The complaint is not about the writing and not about the performance in any craft sense. It is about intelligibility. A four-star reader who otherwise calls the story inspirational and well-deserving of a read reports the author's accent as the one problem with the audio version, and the entry is cut off before the reason arrives. You are left holding a flagged obstacle with no measure attached to it. Sample the recording rather than trusting either the complaint or my inability to check it for you.
Numbers on this listing refuse to agree with each other. The badge shows 4.5 and the counter beside it shows two votes, which would leave that pair sharing nine points between them. Directly underneath sit five written responses, one graded four and the other four graded five. Two votes cannot produce five reviews. Either the counter has gone stale or the column was pooled from a wider source than the tally covers, and the listing gives you no way at all to choose between those explanations. The five written responses are the only usable evidence anywhere on the page.
Inspirational framing is the other thing to weigh before buying. The copy promises a story that will capture your heart and heal your mind, delivered with a maturity and evenness beyond her years, and most of the column agrees: heartfelt, amazing, infectious. But Marielle Venrooy points at darker moments, another closes on a sentence that trails away into ellipses about survival even when, and the underlying subject is a permanent spinal injury with a legal aftermath attached. The marketing and the material pull in slightly different directions, and it is the material that occupies seven hours.
One Listener Already Named the Single Thing
The audience is narrower than the cover copy suggests, and narrower in a useful way. Anyone living through a sudden change in what their body will do has a first-person account here from somebody who has finished the adjusting and is willing to describe the parts that were not uplifting. Readers who like the mindset genre but distrust its usual authors will find one whose standing is not optional. And people who already follow Emma Carey elsewhere are, on the evidence of this column, the most reliably satisfied audience the book has found so far.
Two kinds of listener should hold off. The first wants the accident itself, the drop and the impact and the hospital corridors, because the copy is explicit that the fall works as a hinge, with the bulk of the running time sitting after it. The second wants a memoir with no argument attached, and this one states a thesis in its first paragraph and defends it for seven hours. Everybody else should check the sample first, since the accent question is the only obstacle the column raises and nobody finished raising it. Emma Carey reads her own account. One listener has already named the single thing that might stand between you and that account.
