Audiobooks 03/04/21

This is the latest from the author of Never Let Me Go and his first release since winning the Novel Prize in Literature. Klara is an Artificial Friend who spends her days observing the folks browsing inside the store and passing by on the street, waiting for a customer to choose her. This is “a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the fundamental question: what does it mean to love?”(fiction)

Read by Sura Siu (No Planet B by Lucy Diavolo) – I sampled this audiobook and found what I heard of Sura Sia’s performance to be simultaneously soothing and ominous? Or maybe just foreshadowing? Very interested in this one.

A costly mistake left Carmen Aguilar a few credits short of being able to graduate, so she’s retaking an internship class to earn her high school diploma. That’s how she finds herself working as a Dream, performing at kid parties dressed in a giant Disney princess gown in the middle of a Miami summer. The gig is actually not that bad though, one she gets to do with her best friend. But then the boy who broke her heart joins the Dream team (sorrynotsorry), which is awkward, just as the Dreams are hired to perform at the quinceañera of the bratty cousin who betrayed Carmen and ruined her reputation, which is even more awkward. If she wants to earn those credits, Carmen will have to manage dancing in the brutal Miami heat, fending off that papi chulo ex of hers, and stopping her spoiled prima from ruining her own dang quinceañera. If she can do all of that, she might just get her happily ever after. I’m listening to this one now and I am obsessed! contemporary YA)

Frankie Corzo (Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, A Cuban Girl’s Guide to Tea and Tomorrow by Laura Taylor Namey) – Okay, so I’m doing it (have I done this?) I’m adding Frankie to my list of faves. I enjoy spending time with her so much and feel like she keeps getting better and better at her craft. She was a Cuban mom (and tia, and tio, and prima, etc) in this book.

This book had me at “constellation magic on the Underground Railroad,” then I saw Bahni on narration and, well, ya know. Sold. In this exciting work of speculative historical fantasy, the Civil War is over. Hetty Rhodes is a former conductor on the Underground Railroad who used a combination of wits and magic to shepherd dozens of people north to safety. She and her husband Benjy have settled in Philadelphia where they dedicate themselves to solving murders and mysteries that White authorities want nothing to do with. Then Hetty and Benjy find one of their own slain in an alley; they bury the body and head off in search of answers, but “the secrets and intricate lies of the elites of Black Philadelphia only serve to dredge up more questions. To solve this mystery, they will have to face ugly truths all around them, including the ones about each other.”

Read by Bahni Turpin (The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, Cinderella is Dead by Kalynn Bayron, Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi)

I’ve been meaning to read Elly Griffiths for years, and how can I resist when her latest is pitched for fans of Anthony Horowitz and Agatha Christie?? A 90-year-old woman, Peggy, dies of a heart condition—nothing to investigate there, right? That’s what Detective Sergeant Harbinder Kaur thinks at first, then the deceased woman’s caretaker, Natalka, shows up at the police station with some interesting information: while clearing out the woman’s flat, Natalka finds an unusual number of crime novels, all dedicated to Peggy with a cryptic postscript. Detective Kaur suspects there’s more going here that meets the eye, especially when a gunman breaks into the house, steals one of the books, and the novel’s author is found dead shortly thereafter. That marks the beginning of a string of attacks on writers from Aberdeen to Edinburgh. Must! read! (mystery)

Read by Nina Wadia (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach)

This audiobook is a 19-hour listen (less at the 1.2 speed at which I listened to it, but still) but I finished it in a little over two days. I went on so many dang walks, took my sweet time folding laundry, cooked a bunch—any excuse to throw on this audiobook because I just couldn’t stop.

Plot refresher: What we’re getting here is Southern Black Girl Magic with a modern-day twist on Arthurian legend plus a little romance, too. After her mother dies in a car accident, 16-year-old Bree Matthews needs an escape from painful memories and her childhood home. She and her bestie enroll at a residential program for bright high school students at UNC Chapel Hill thinking it’ll be just the thing to bring Bree back to life, but things don’t go according to plan. On her very first night on campus, she witnesses a magical attack that she very much wasn’t supposed to see and almost gets kicked out of the program for being caught off campus. In the aftermath of the attack, Bree discovers that the memory erasure that was supposed to work on her has failed, so she starts asking questions and ruffling feathers. This is how she comes to find out that Chapel Hill is home to a secret demon-fighting society known as the Legendborn whose members are descendants of King Arthur and his knights, and that she possesses a unique magic of her own. Also… a giant magical war is coming and it’s bringing bloodthirsty beasts. This book is a RIDE, yo.

It really is so special to spend time with a heroine like Bree, one who’s dealing with the big evil forces/scary monsters/buried legacy stuff while also navigating the microagressions (and the macro ones) that come with being a young Black woman in the south. I was so ready for the Arthurian stuff with a Black girl lead, but I really didn’t know how deep this book was going to go—or in what direction—and I don’t know how much of it I should tell you either. Part of the “oh… snap!” fun is in finding those parts out for yourself. I figured we were going to see Bree deal with unprocessed grief, and watch her field all kinds of uncertainty as she came to terms with her powers and the secrets of her ancestry. I did not know the exploration of those themes would also be a condemnation of cultural appropriation and our country’s racist past (I am once again bursting with how badly I want to say more here!). Tracy Deonn has done something so incredible with this book, one that makes so many important statements both in its drop-the-mic moments and its asides. Arthurian purists are gonna be big mad.

Joniece Abbott-Pratt’s performance damn near had me in tears. Bree really goes through it in this book and Joniece Abbott-Pratt conveys every one of those ups and downs with such precision, such conviction. The way her voice goes all tender and soft in the romantic bits, or how it cracks in the emotional scenes? Listen, I did the whole Kerry Washington lip quiver at a local park as I sat there trying to keep it together. What a knockout narrator for a knockout book. And guess what? There’s a sequel coming.