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All tagged Audiobooks
Part of my aversion to verse novels can be attributed to my first experience, which was Crank by Ellen Hopkins. The angsty, dramatic, dark story of addiction that is perennially popular with teenagers didn’t appeal to me at all.
The sentences
just seemed so
choppy.
The line breaks
nonsensical,
random.
It's hard for me to write lengthy reviews of audiobooks because I don't retain details quite as well when I'm listening. But I thought I'd share some brief reflections on some books I listened to recently.
By far, my most surprising read was Zac & Mia, which is one of those review copies that I downloaded on impulse because the folks at Harper Collins have me auto-approved for their books. Little did I know that it had won the Text Prize in Australia a couple of years ago, because that would've been my first clue that it was a good one. It's getting a lot of comparisons to The Fault in Our Stars, but I'm not sure that's an apt one, though the subject matter is similar. If I were to compare it stylistically to a "cancer book," I'd probably say it's more similar to The Probability of Miracles by Wendy Wunder, but that's not that best comparison either. It's actually just unique, with a distinctive voice and style.
“...some things are better left in the past. And true things are destined to repeat themselves.”
If I were to slap a genre name on The Program, I'd say it's speculative fiction or allegorical alternate reality (which I don't think is actually a genre). It's set in a very familiar world, much like the modern day (it's set in my home state of Oregon, so it felt particularly familiar to me). Except in this iteration of our world, teen depression and suicide are an epidemic, one that's dealt with in an extreme way, hence The Program.
The Program is an extreme course of treatment for teen depression, in which memories of all things negative, painful and emotive are removed. Any extreme reaction can result in a trip to The Program, and those who return from the "treatment" are shells of their former selves.
In the case of The Program's narrator, Sloane, she's already seen what can happen to those who are untreated--her beloved brother died as a result of suicide, and it destroyed her parents. She made it through the dark days following her brother's death thanks to her boyfriend (and her brother's best friend), James. Together, they fight the darkness that threatens them. After that, a bunch of stuff happens (obviously, since it's not exactly a short book), all of which will massively spoil The Program if I share the details. But, let's just say, what Sloane experiences is quite harrowing and explores a number of compelling concepts including memory and social control.
That's the long way of my saying that this isn't a "review" of Jennifer Donnelly's A Northern Light. Instead, it's more a few impressions of why this historical novel worked for me when so many others have not.
The crux of the story set in 1906 upstate New York (around Utica and Cortland, in the Adirondacks) and centers around two converging stories. The first is 16-year old Mattie's life on a farm, where her aspirations of a bookish life and college in New York City collide with the economic realities of caring for her sisters and helping her father on the farm, as well as the expectations for a girl her age to marry and establish a household. The second story is a mystery around the death of young woman staying at the hotel where Mattie works who's body is found in the lake. (This is drawn from real events, and also inspired the Book An American Tragedy and the film A Place in the Sun.)
I figured giving this particular book a whirl, since I had a couple of gratis Audible credits, and while I had extremely mixed feelings about The Time Between Us, I still enjoyed it quite a bit and am definitely onboard for the sequel, because there's something about this story that's extremely engaging and entertaining--and this was very much bolstered by the narrator's performance.
Time Between Us is set in 1995 Evanston, Illinois and is told in the first person present perspective of Anna, a 16-year old avid runner who works in her father's bookstore and dreams of traveling the world. She meets Bennett, a boy she first spots at the track where she runs and later enrolls as a temporary student at the private school she attends.
The two embark on an intense, whirlwind of a romance, culminating in Anna's discovery that Bennett has a big secret: he's from 2012, not 1995 and has traveled through time in search of someone from his present.
Much of this premise mirrors the plot of the hordes of paranormal YA novels that exploded in recent years: average girl, mysterious book, special powers, etcetera, etcetera. However, despite that the basics of Time Between Us are nothing new, there's something fresh and fun in the writing and the engaging pace of the story. Some of this is because of the travel-meets-time travel aspect which we see through Anna's enthusiastic, very (in a good way) teenage eyes. But it's also because the wintery Evanston setting is well done and Anna has friends whose characters are well-developed and important to the story. She has a rich life before Bennett--she simply dreams of more.
Audiobooks have never really worked for me--I'm not sure why, but I suspect that because my previous attempts at audiobooking were pre-iPod, so a lot of the listening was annoying on a technical level, with the messing with CDs and all. I also think I'd chosen the wrong types of books for audio, since if I recall correctly, I mostly chose long, complex books, which weren't the easiest for me to track in shorter chunks while operating a motorized vehicle.
I adored finishing the the wonderful Curse Workers series on audio. Jesse Eisenberg narrates and adds so much to Cassel's voice, actually making him sound more teenage and funny, which I didn't pick up in the first book, which I read in the traditional way.
I also loved listening to Catherine Gilbert Murdock's phenomenal Dairy Queen series (recommended by Flannery), which I'd actually started as an ebook a couple years ago and for some reason I couldn't get into (probably a wrong frame of mind thing). The narrator does a brilliant job of capturing both the Wisconsin accent and D.J.'s neurotic, self-deprecating tone.
