Reply To: Audiobooks

I’ve just started doing a mock audiobook read to see if I like doing it. I’m 50/50. I haven’t listened to audio books much in the past so I don’t really know what the status quo is, but one of the characters in my book is black. I have a voice I’m fairly certain is fine for him, but me being neurotic, I worry that someone could perceive inflection on any person outside the natural range of the VO artist can be taken offense to ( I also had a young Chinese girl character and I’m just sidestepping that one as much as possible, haha). Of course, you can’t please all the people all the time, but does someone more seasoned have a rule of thumb for deciding if a character’s voice is respectful of the characters background, while making good use of the reasonably agreeable traits of said background?

For example, native Chinese speakers that newly learn English (in my experience) tend to have glottal stops a lot at the end of their sentences because the Chinese language is tonal, or Southern drawls have long vowels because culturally that’s the norm in the south. I’m aware that ofc many foreigners have native pronunciation of neutral American English, but the book I’m reading, everyone is a bit of a caricature. Am I overthinking this?