The Irresponsible Reader

The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne

by Ron Currie, read by NAME

DETAILS:
Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
Publication Date: March 25, 2025
Format: Unabridged Audiobook
Length: 10 hrs., 37 min.

What Does the Publisher Say about The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne?

A mythic, propulsive novel about the tangled fates of a matriarchal crime family in Maine.

Your ancestors breathe through you. Sometimes, they call for vengeance.

Babs Dionne, proud Franco-American, doting grandmother, and vicious crime matriarch, rules her small town of Waterville, Maine, with an iron fist. She controls the flow of drugs into Little Canada with the help of her loyal lieutenants, girlfriends since they were teenagers, and her eldest daughter, Lori, a Marine vet struggling with addiction.

When a drug kingpin discovers that his numbers are down in the upper northeast, he sends a malevolent force, known only as The Man, to investigate. At the same time, Babs’s youngest daughter, Sis, has gone missing, which doesn’t seem at all like a coincidence. In twenty-four hours, Sis will be found dead, and the whole town will seek shelter from Babs’s wrath.

The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne is a crime saga like no other, with a ferocious matriarch at its bruised, beating heart. With sharp wit and profound empathy, award-winning author Ron Currie, delivers an unforgettable novel exploring love, retribution, and the ancestral roots that both nurture and trap us.

A Word about the Narration

My problem with the book had nothing to do with Lisa Flanagan. Her narration wasn’t enough to keep me invested, but I had no problems with what she did.

If anything, the way she slipped back and forth into the occasional French word/phrase was rather adroit and smoother than similar transitions that I’ve heard.

So, Why Did I DNF The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne?

It’s pretty clear that this is a “literary” novel that has to do with a crime family, and not a crime novel that’s so good that it transcends the genre and can be called literary. (let the reader understand that I say these things while holding my nose, rejecting these distinctions, but it does give a pretty good feel for the book.)

I’m not opposed to the former books at all, but as a whole, they don’t grab me the way the latter do. And that’s part of the problem here–also, there was another library hold that became available the same day that appealed to me more–that didn’t help when my attention was wavering. But neither of those is enough to make me DNF it.

But the first 49 +/- minutes of this book (roughly 8%) was the prologue. Again, that’s not a deal breaker for me–it just felt like a slog. Why? Partially, it was a bunch of history about no one we were really given a reason to care about until nearly the end of it.

You couple that with the Prologue being in the second person and it’s just too much. I have a low 2nd-person tolerance. Something in the Second has to be compelling as all get-out and probably brief. I listened to just enough of the first chapter to be pretty sure that it was in the 3rd-person, but by that point, I was just turned off.

I may return to it sometime–now that I know what I’m getting in for, my expectations will be in the right place. But between timing, the long prologue, and an interest-killing 2nd person prologue…it just didn’t work for me–no matter how fine-and-possibly-good the narration was.