Rebecca Soler is a busy voice actor working and living in New York City, who found recognition when she began working in romantasy.Sara Naomi Lewkowicz/The Globe and Mail
Not so long ago, Rebecca Soler was picking up her daughter from preschool when her professional and personal worlds collided.
“My daughter’s teacher, my beloved Ms. Liz, said to me, ‘I was in my car, listening to Fourth Wing, and the narrator’s voice sounds so familiar …’” says Soler. “And I was like, ‘Ms. Liz, what chapter are you on?!’ And she was like, ‘Four,’ and I said, ‘Ms. Liz, abort, abort!’”
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Soler’s hilariously panicked reaction is because, as you might have guessed, she is indeed the voice actor behind the audiobook versions of all three books (so far) in Rebecca Yarros’s wildly bestselling, famously spicy Empyrean romantasy series.
Much like the books in this series about dragon-riding students at a war academy, the audiobooks have dominated the bestseller charts, with the release of the latest instalment, Onyx Storm, pushing them all back up to the top spots again.
For a profession that tends to afford its performers generous professional privacy, Soler is increasingly finding that she is recognized.
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“People who I meet that don’t know what I do will suddenly say, ‘Wait a minute, that was you! I listened to that,’” says Soler, an audiobook narrator who has voiced titles across genres including YA, women’s fiction and other fantasy. “And my Cuban aunts have been like, ‘Rebecca, do we need to listen to Onyx Storm?’ And I’m like, ‘No Tía, please. This is not the one for you to listen to because it is going to be real weird for you, real quick.’”
Soler had no idea that she was about to play a part in one of the biggest stories in books of this century.Sara Naomi Lewkowicz/The Globe and Mail
When she got the gig to record the first book, Soler had no concept she was about to play a part in one of the biggest stories in books of this century.
“I knew that it was a page-turner,” she says. “But it was an indie publisher and if anything that makes you think it’s not going to be the size of other books that I’ve done that have had larger publishers.”
She didn’t even audition for it. The job was just offered to her, thanks to a small-world connection: Soler had gone to high school with Yarros’s publicist.
Meeting Yarros in person helped validate the approach she took in her audio interpretation, she says.
“She speaks really quickly, she has a very fast humour and that just solidified the choices I made. I’ve been fast-talking as Violet, and being really sarcastic and underplayed as Ridoc and rolling my eyes and exasperated as Tairn,” says Soler of her voices for various key characters. “Having met Rebecca, I understand that is her pace, and I am happy that I got it right.”
Narrating a complex, dense, plot-and-world-building book like this, Soler adds, is “more difficult” than most. To help her keep track of the characters – including the voices she does for them – she creates a detailed “org chart” of who everyone is, how they’re connected, the name of their dragon or griffin, and whether they’re alive or dead.
She’ll read the book four times before recording it, marking up her copy with cues and phonetics that help her say certain unique-to-the-Empyrean-universe words – Basgiath, Tirnanoc, Rhiannon with a long “ahh” sound.
Each 500-ish page book takes Soler, working with an engineer, five days of recording solidly from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. She caffeinates with an unsweetened black iced coffee, avoiding anything with dairy to prevent “mouth sounds.” On day four or five, she’ll reach for an almond milk latte. “You need that espresso, because my lord, Rebecca is relentless. The last few chapters do not let up. There’s no denouement in her books.”
Teddy Hamilton, real name Andrew Eiden, is another familiar Empyrean voice. He pops up for chapters told from the perspective of Xaden Riorson, the charismatic and enigmatic third year whom the heroine, Violet Sorrengail, finds herself irresistibly drawn to in the first book.
“I’ve worked with Rebecca Yarros on so many of her books, so it’s been fun to see this become mainstream outside of the romance world,” says Eiden, who adds that despite their long professional relationship, he’s had very limited interaction with the author.
“I think that’s by design, because I know other narrators who do interact with her a lot,” he says. “I play an interesting role with her, because I play all of her male main characters. Those are fantasies that she’s writing – and that’s a thing with the fandom too, where they wish they didn’t know who I actually was because then they could just imagine the fantasy character, and I’m very much not the fantasy character.”
Eiden, who’s prolific in the romance narrating space, thinks that Yarros trusts him to understand her, and he trusts her in return.
“She talks to me through her writing, and I talk to her through my narration,” he says. “To me, it’s always about the book. It’s about what Rebecca has written, and my responsibility is to understand what she means by it. What does this moment mean to the book, to my character? And what effect is this supposed to have on the reader?”
Xaden is a particularly intense character, although given Yarros’s interest in writing books about men who have been at war and may have PTSD, based on her own husband’s experience, that’s not exactly unusual.
“I always say her books are cryfests,” says Eiden. “I’ve never sobbed more in narrating a book than I have with a Rebecca Yarros audiobook.”
While he’s already got a devoted following, being part of the Empyrean universe has put “Teddy Hamilton” on a more mainstream map.
“I’ve also gotten so many texts from people who will say, ‘Are you Teddy Hamilton? I’m listening to you!’ They wouldn’t normally listen to the types of books Teddy usually does,” says Eiden. “I’ve also had some of my buddies say, ‘Oh, I was talking to some girls last night and I was showing off that I know Teddy Hamilton.’”
It’s been such a big deal that Eiden says he recently had some in the industry come up to him and ask why he didn’t do the narrations under his real name rather than this stage name. “And I said it was because Rebecca Yarros didn’t ask for Andrew Eiden. She asked for Teddy Hamilton,” he says.
Another testament to the appetite for content in this series is that in addition to the audiobooks, there’s a dramatized audio adaptation produced by GraphicAudio, with a full cast of voice actors playing the different parts.
Khaya Fraites is the voice behind Violet Sorrengail. She’s busy in her home recording studio working on the dramatized adaptation of Onyx Storm, set for release in May.
“I wasn’t told what I was auditioning for originally,” says Fraites, who’d only been doing small parts in various audio adaptations before she landed the part. “The director just said, ‘I have a book and I think you’d be good for it. The character is young, badass, think Katniss Everdeen.’”
At that stage, she hadn’t read the book, although she is a big reader herself. The scene she auditioned with was the “parapet scene,” where new students have to walk a lethal gauntlet before they even make it into the war academy building.
“I gave it my best shot, and I felt good about it,” says Fraites. “The director e-mailed me a few weeks later and he said, ‘You got the part. It’s for a little book called Fourth Wing. You may have heard of it?’”
Even then, she didn’t really have a sense of how big it was all going to be. That changed with Iron Flame, the second book to come out, and she began posting some of the behind-the-scenes of the recording process to TikTok.
“I started to interact with people, and I began to realize that, ‘Oh, this is kind of big,’” says Fraites, who tries not to let the pressure get in the way of her performance.
“I find Violet incredibly relatable. I feel like I have a lot in common with her, because she operates from a place of desperate protection for the people she loves because she’s experienced so much loss and grief,” says Fraites.
“I’ve also had a lot of loss at a young age. Once you’ve experienced a grief like losing a parent, you’re constantly operating from that space in whatever you’re doing.”
The emotional intensity of these stories means that Fraites often takes breaks while recording, and she sobbed in the booth when one character died.
“It may come off as extremely dramatic, but it is heavy. To be able to perform from that place, you do have to go there,” she says.
While she’s never been recognized in the wild for her work as Violet, she does get DMs from fans about it. “People have been so kind,” she says. “Someone messaged me recently and said, ‘You keep me company at 4 o’clock in the morning when I need something to listen to.’”
That warm embrace is also a draw for Soler. She gets DMs almost every single day from people saying nice things about her narration.
“Audiobook listeners are discerning, passionate and have high expectations,” she concludes. “If they give you a compliment, know that it is really well-earned because you have been in their ear for hours, and you can either be super annoying to them, or super mission critical.”