Audiobooks

May 24, 2013 | Published in Audiobooks, Fiction, Jennifer

The Last Camellia

Last year I read (actually, listened to a great audiobook version) Sarah Jio’s Blackberry Winter. I loved it! When offered a copy of her newest book, The Last Camellia, I didn’t hesitate. I found similarities in the style of both of these books, and what I didn’t notice until later, is that the books are actually mostly free of language or sexual content, which I don’t miss at all when it’s not there.

The Last Camellia presents the stories of two women in alternating chapters. Both Addison and Flora live in the same home in England — Flora as a nanny and Addison as a visitor to the home that her husband’s family has recently acquired.

They both are involved in trying to find out more about the rare Middlebury Camellia reputed to be on the property. Both have secrets that haunt them while they are there. As the stories unfold, we also find out more about what the women are hiding and why.

This novel combines the best of historical fiction with a contemporary setting as well, featuring romance, family drama, mystery and suspense. The story wrapped up nicely, but not in a completely predictable way. Like I said, after reading two of Sarah Jio’s books in the last year and a half, I’m a definite fan.

This video trailer gives a tease and really sets the stage. It makes me want to be there right now!

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The Fate Of Mercy Alban

Grace Alban has returned to her childhood home, Alban House, after a 20 year absence, to bury her mother, who died the same day she was to speak to a reporter about an event that occurred 50 years earlier - the suicide of writer David Coleville and disappearance of Grace’s aunt, Fate Alban. When the reporter turns up at her mother’s funeral, accompanied by a woman claiming to be Fate, Grace begins to unearth secrets held within the walls of the house for decades. Was Grace’s mother a victim of the so-called curse on her family? And are Grace and her daughter in danger of being the next victims?

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A Heart Like Mine

I like audiobooks, but had been in a bit of a slump. This was a good audiobook rendition, so that helped get me excited about listening, but it was also an excellent novel by Amy Hatvany, no matter what the format.

I was first introduced to Hatvany’s work when I read and reviewed The Language of Sisters. It was sort of chick-lit-ish, but it was also a little more emotionally resonant than I expect from that genre. However, Heart Like Mine was exactly what I love in my women’s fiction: real issues tackled in a deep way. It reminded me a lot of Jodi Picoult’s work which deals with women’s issues, even as far as telling the story in alternating points of view (which is probably one of my favorite types of narrative).

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Family Pictures

Jane Green is a master of women’s fiction, tackling subjects women understand and often relate to. Family Pictures is another entertaining novel about women with complicated lives and relationships.

Sylvie thought the worst thing to ever happen to her was the loss of her husband, Jonathan, leaving her and her daughter Eve alone. But 10 years later, Sylvie has remarried and moved to California, living a content life with her husband, who travels frequently for business. Sylvie’s life is far from perfect, as she worries about Eve who has grown painfully thin, and must also deal with her mother’s frequent and confused phone calls.

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The Middlesteins

Edie Middlestein is obese and suffering the health effects of her fast food and junk food diet, and to make things worse, her husband of 40 years has just left her. Richard is fed up with Edie’s refusal to take care of herself and the sham their marriage has become. Daughter Robin, who spends her time in the bar across the street with her neighbor Daniel, thinks what her father did is unforgivable. Son Benny just wants everyone to get along, assisted by his affinity for smoking pot each night, and Benny’s wife Rachelle makes it her life’s mission to save Edie’s life, while planning her twins’ b’nai mitzvah.

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Greyhound

I believe this book is marketed as a book for adults, and I understand that, but in a world where many young adult books contain very explicit language and sexual content, a book such as Greyhound, by Steffan Piper, which has some difficult mature content about a 12-year-old boy, should not be held back from teens.

Sebastien Ranes is a good kid. In spite of living in emotional and sometimes physical neglect with his mother, he seems not to have completely lost it. The depth of his mother’s insensitivity is revealed when she puts her not-quite-12-year-old son on a Greyhound bus from California to Pennsylvania with only $35.

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Three Good Things

Lanie and Ellen are sisters who lost their mother at a young age, 6 and 16 respectively. While their father grieved, taking care of Lanie fell to Ellen, and now adults, they’re still close, and still remember the advice their mother gave them.

Ellen is the owner of a bakery that specializes in kringle, a Danish pastry popular in the mid-west, and a stickler for grammar. When she receives the anonymous gift of a book about grammar, she narrows down the suspects to Henry, one of her customers, who lost his wife in a car accident. But Ellen’s ex-husband, Max, shows up at her door, begging her to move to a Caribbean island with her, testing her burgeoning yet fragile relationship with Henry.

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Crash

Jules lives with her family above their restaurant, which means she smells like pizza most of the time and drives their double-meatball-shaped food truck to school. It’s not a recipe for popularity, but she can handle that.

What she can’t handle is the recurring vision that haunts her. Over and over, Jules sees a careening truck hit a building and explode…and nine body bags in the snow.

The vision is everywhere – on billboards, television screens, windows – and she’s the only one who sees it. And the more she sees it, the more she sees. The vision is giving her clues, and soon Jules knows what she has to do.

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Eight Girls Taking Pictures

Whitney Otto is best known for her best-selling novel that was made into a film, How to Make an American Quilt. After a long break between novels, she’s back with Eight Girls Taking Pictures, a love story of female photographers and their passion.

Eight Girls Taking Pictures is a collection of loosely-linked short stories, spanning the 20th century and following eight different female photographers and their lives as models, muses, lovers, and mothers. The women all come from similar backgrounds, with parents who encourage and often fund their interest in photography, and all deal with the same issues of being taken seriously.

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The Magician’s Apprentice

Baz has always dreamed about leaving his dusty little town, so when a stranger comes to his family’s home and asks him to be a weaver’s apprentice, Baz is eager to start his journey. He and the stranger travel for several sunrises and sunsets until they reach the land of Kallah, where Baz starts his apprenticeship—and soon learns that his master is very cruel. Baz is disheartened, and when the master trades Baz for a sword to a magician, Baz expects no better from his new owner. But as Baz travels further into the depths of the desert with this kind–hearted and wise magician, he learns to re-examine his beliefs about people, the world, and himself, discovering that everything is connected in a continuous journey toward destiny and that no person or thing can ever really be owned.

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The Secret Keeper

At the age of 16, from the safety of the treehouse in her family’s yard, Laurel Nicolson observes a stranger approaching the house and then speaking to her mother, Dorothy. Laurel then witnesses an event she believes is caused by her mother protecting her family and their home, Green Acres. 50 years later, Laurel has returned to Green Acres for her mother’s 90th birthday. A photo of her mother and a woman called Vivian as well as the overwhelming memories of that fateful day incite Laurel to investigate what really happened so long ago.

The Secret Keeper is told both in flashbacks and present time, as Laurel tries to figure out her mother’s past, the reader is hearing events as they unfold from Dorothy’s and Vivian’s points of view.

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A Walk on the Beach

Early this year, I was visiting a friend and plucked A Year by the Sea: Thoughts of an Unfinished Woman off her bookshelf. I had heard of Joan Anderson at some point, so I picked up this slim memoir about an empty nester who took a year-long break from her husband and her home to live in her small vacation home in Cape Cod for some self-discovery. It was an interesting journey that most of us will never take. I wouldn’t want to, but I enjoyed reading about it.