Evil Eye

'Evil Eye' is told entirely through phone calls and voicemail messages. Even though using this technique to capture all the action required a little ingenuity at one point, I found style immersive and engaging.

I loved the progression in the story. At the start, in the conversations between the living and working in America daughter and her returned home to New Delhi mother, it seems as if the story is about a mother anxious to get her now almost twenty-nine-years old daughter married. Of the two, the daughter is the one easiest to relate to. I smiled as I watched her appease her anxious and seeemingly out of touch mother.

Then the story took a darker turn and my perceptions began to shift. As the tension rose, it increasingly seemed as show more if it was the mother who really understood what was going on. Except that what the mother thought was going on was impossible. Wasn't it?

This was a tense story that kept me guessing and which conveyed a real sense of threat. show less

I got this from Audible for free as part of their two free Audible Originals per month deal for their members. I didn’t really enjoy this at all. It was okay but not really my thing.

This is a supernatural thriller about an Indian mom who is pressuring her daughter to marry. When her daughter finally meets the perfect Indian man, the mother has reservations.

This is actually done as a full production audio performance with many characters doing voices. The majority of this is book is told through phone conversations and voicemails. I found the constant phone ringing sounds pretty annoying, they were louder than the rest of the audio and very distracting. I think the performance would have been a lot better either without them or with show more the sound decreased.

This is one I really could have taken or leaven. It was an okay story but very predictable. There’s really nothing special here and I didn’t enjoy listening to it all that much. However, it was free so there’s that. I think some readers might enjoy the mystery or the interactions between the mother and daughter.

Overall I would recommend skipping. The story is okay but predictable. I also didn’t enjoy the performance and found it kind of annoying. show less

This short audiobook is about the clash between young and old ways and Indian and American cultures. The story is mostly told through phone calls and feels almost like a play with the different characters playing their roles. I love this unique method of storytelling of this very creepy eery story. Highly recommended.

Audioplay effectively done via phone calls and voicemails
Review of the Audible Studios audiobook edition (May 2019)

I was impressed with this audio production which managed to tell its entire story via what you would think would the very limited medium of recreated phone calls and voicemails. The credit is shared between the voice actors and the sound design & production staff as the tone of voice and the ambience went a long way in conveying the believability of the performance.

The plot is mainly told through the conversations of the daughter Pallavi (voiced by Annapurna Sriram) and her mother Usha (voiced by Rita Wolf). There are three smaller roles in the father, a spiritual counsellor and the boyfriend. Pallavi is fighting off the show more long-distance machinations of her mother's matchmaking until she finally happens to meet a boyfriend on her own. The new boyfriend seems ideal. The mother is not so certain about that and has her own family secrets as the reason. It all comes to a climax in an action set-piece which is effectively captured via a voice message which is left recording.

Evil Eye is an Audible Theatre Emerging Playwrights commission. It is the first one of the 15 initial commissions to be produced & released to my knowledge. It was one of the free Audible Originals offers to members for May 2019. show less

Wow! That was totally not what I was expecting! Starts off kind of funny with a pesky Indian mom trying to get her daughter married off and then turns surprisingly spooky and dark. Highly recommended.

Wow. This is a fantastic audiobook and it is done so, so well. A short, thrilling but extremely captivating story of a Telugu family in the US (worry not, the book is in English). This book is a series of phone calls to tell a story with so many twist and turns. Highly recommend it.

(I am so thrilled at these audiobook and production quality. This gives a peek into the future of the audio content. We are not going to just get a person reassign a book or talking to an expert over the audio. It’s going to more vibrant and exciting.)

This Amazon-exclusive, audio-only horror tale is about a young Indian American woman named Pallavi. Independent-minded, she's been dodging her anxious, superstitious mom's attempts to arrange her marriage. On her own, she meets a Mr. Right that even mom should approve. But moms have secrets.

Unlike in most audiobooks, all the characters are voiced by different actors and there are sound effects and occasional background music. The narrative is epistolary, told through phone conversations and voicemails. A decent, attention-keeping listen for its 98-minute duration.