Author: Kendra Winchester

Before I listened to He Who Fights with Monsters, I had no idea that the LitRPG genre existed. Imagine my surprise that my 15-year relationship with World of Warcraft would directly translate to stories featuring characters who are in video games. But last year, I was randomly assigned this audiobook for a review, and I fell head over heels in love with Heath Miller’s rendition of Jason Asano, a Japanese Australian man thrown into a completely different universe. There, Asano finds himself in a video game-like world where he must gain experience by defeating monsters while saving villagers as he moves through the world. I just finished volume seven of the ongoing series, and now have listened to Miller’s performance for more hours than I can count. It’s one I pre-order as soon as I can and download the day it comes out.

I don’t even have words to express my joy when I realized that Rick Riordan and Roshani Chokshi were teaming up as a writer/editor team for the first book in Riordan’s new imprint. Aru is an Indian American girl who accidentally unleashed a terrible evil into the world only to find out that she is a reincarnation of one of the Pandava brothers. That series also made me a forever Soneela Nankani fan as I listened to her brilliantly perform every book in this series over the last five years.

Forever and always, I will love this novel. It’s centered around Esch, a teenage girl who lost her mother as a young girl and who now lives with her dad and siblings in the Mississippi Delta. As hurricane Katrina is headed their way, Esch tries to prepare for the storm and take care of her younger brothers. While I listened to a previous version of the audiobook performed by Cherise Boothe, I love January LaVoy, so it was well worth relistening to. It’s a unique experience hearing the different narrators make their performance their own. They use different voices and interpretation of tone and cadence in the dialogue. Boothe’s edition of the audiobook is now out of print, as it were, so it may be hard to find, but both versions are fantastic.

After listening to her perform Nightcrawling, Joniece Abbott-Pratt has won my never-ending love and support. She perfectly captured Kiara’s narrative voice and voiced the dialogue with such great attention to detail.

The novel begins when Kiara has already dropped out of school and is just trying to pay the rent. Her mother is gone and her dad died years ago, so it’s just she and her brother living in their tiny apartment in Oakland, California. But Kiara’s brother, Marcus, believes his time is better spent pursuing his music career instead of working a minimum wage job just trying to make ends meet. After struggling for months, Kiara feels like she has no other choice than to turn to sex work.

Abbott-Pratt has this incredible ability to create a sense of emotional intimacy between her and the listener, which is a vital part of any audiobook performance. But with her skill with dialogue and understanding of the novel’s main character, Abbott-Pratt creates an incredible listening experience.

Haven is set in 7th-century Ireland, when a priest chooses two monks to travel with him to an abandoned island to create a religious haven of sorts. With as few supplies as possible, the group makes their home with only seabirds and puffins for company. In my mind, this book could be described as Lauren Groff’s Matrix meets Gary Pausen’s Hatchet. Now you may not enjoy survival and religious figure stories like I do, but for me, this novel was an immediate must-listen.

What’s more, I loved Aiden Kelly’s narration. Kelly performs Haven with such skill and sense of atmosphere. I will definitely be looking up what else Kelly has narrated.

All-star audiobook narrator Janina Edwards performs Deesha Philyaw’s stunning short story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies. Each one of these stories features a Black woman connected to the church in some way. Some are young women and girls who attend with their mothers and grandmothers. One is the infamous “other woman.” Another is a queer woman who has left the South, and her church lady mother, far behind. Each one of these stories is a perfect, polished gem. They’re full of wit, emotional depth, and just brilliant storytelling. Edwards gives each protagonist such a unique narrative voice, making every story stand out.

Cowney Sequoyah is a 19-year-old Cherokee man who’s just gotten a job as a groundskeeper at the historic Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina. But with WWII ongoing, the inn is being used to hold diplomates from Axis countries. When a young Japanese girl goes missing, Cowney is brought in for questioning. This historical fiction novel is Clapsaddle’s debut, and I loved every second of it. It has family secrets, unrequited love, and a coming-of-age story all wrapped into one. Kaipo Schwab does a great job of performing the story from Cowney’s perspective.

I’d never read Annie Dillard before, so I thought that this was the perfect time to pick up some of her legendary essays. The audiobook is under three hours long, but she packs a lot into such a short amount of space. Her insights about writing and living as a writer seem to flow so effortlessly from her mind. But even while she makes it look so easy, she describes how she often agonizes over a single turn of phrase. Tavia Gilbert performs the audiobook in such a soothing way — I could listen to her read Annie Dillard for hours!

I’ve been waiting for this memoir for SO LONG! Ah! So Alice Wong, legendary disability rights activist and editor of the anthology Disability Visibility, is back — this time, to tell her own story. In her memoir, she shares moments from her life in a scrapbook-like format with photos, transcripts, and illustrations (the audiobook comes with a PDF of those images, which she also describes in the audiobook). Nancy Wu performs Wong’s story and captures the author’s grace, resilience, and wit. This is an audiobook I will listen to over and over again. I’m so happy that it’s now out into the world.