The Chosen One from Audible.com

The Chosen One from Amazon.com

Author: Carol Lynch Williams

Reader: Jenna Lamia

Short Review: A good book about a controversial subject, improved by an excellent reading by Jenna Lamia.

Long Review: Jenna Lamia is a true standout as a narrator, and I plan to seek out her other work. She truly inhabited Kyra, the protagonist, and her excellent reading improved a book which is flawed in some important ways.

I find the subject of the book particularly interesting. My husband’s family lives in Utah, and during our visits there the events and tragedies on the polygamist compounds in Utah and Colorado are always topics of conversation. I’m certainly no expert on polygamist cults, but I’ve read a number of books about Mormon fundamentalists and the history of the region, so I felt like I had a handle on the subject. Williams’ portrayal of the compound felt realistic enough, though I was waiting for her to be even more critical of the systemic abuse against women, girls, and boys at the hands of the elders of such cults. Perhaps my personal views on women’s rights are too radical to align or compare to the author’s. I thought Kyra was an interesting, sympathetic character and I found it easy to root for her, but I felt myself waiting for Kyra to recognize how wronged she and her siblings had been by her family and community.

I found Kyra’s naivete and foolishness particularly frustrating. The fact that she remains so trusting and innocent as the story progresses seems to work in direct contrast to the opening lines of the book. I know I would have enjoyed the paper book less, because I wouldn’t have had Lamia’s great voice and acting to keep me entranced while I was waiting for Kyra to learn to think critically and just be careful. I wanted her to break free of the cult and be safe, yet she kept repeating the same mistakes and neglecting to think of her safety or anyone else’s.

At some points, I was wondering if the author was holding back a bit too much. She certainly turned a harsh eye to the polygamist cult Kyra grew up in, but I felt like she didn’t press the questions of women’s rights far enough. Perhaps the author’s faith prevented her from railing against those forms of oppression that are common not just to polygamist cults but to Christian and Mormon churches in general.

Readers: Davina Porter and Simon Prebble

Short Review: Clarke’s entrancing, charming short stories about the magical world introduced in Jonathan Strange & Mr.Norrell particularly focusing on the women who practice magic in this alternate England and run-ins between Englishpeople and faeries. Prebble and Porter are incomparably good readers, taking turns reading stories about men and women, respectively. Clarke’s storytelling is downright fascinating, and her language precise and beautiful. I love this audiobook, have listened to it twice, and know I’ll listen to it again and again. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Long Review: I absolutely loved Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. The only real fault I found with it (and yes, I know this is obnoxious) was Prebble’s mispronunciation of the word sidhe. Prebble reads the first section of this book, and I can’t tell you how widely I smiled when he said sidhe, and said it correctly. We language geeks can be pleased just as easily as we can be annoyed.

The title story of this volume is one of the real gems of the book. It describes Jonathan Strange’s meeting with the ladies of Grace Adieu, where his brother-in-law serves as a preacher. The Ladies, of course, practice magic in secret: in this alternate England, most Englishmen assume no women have any truck with magic, and that no one alive apart from Norrell and Strange has any real power. Porter narrates this story, and her reading is fantastic. She uses a precise, posh British accent for many of the characters, but switches deftly from one character and accent to another. She keeps to a quick pace, but her diction is so clear that no meaning or words are lost. Porter also reads “Mrs. Mabb;” “On Lickerish Hill,” a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin; and “Antickes and Frets.” The latter two are particularly dear to me because they trace magical spinning and magical attacks via embroidery. As a fiber-artist, I love to see anyone write well about fiber arts.

Prebble reads the introduction and the other stories in the book. Of his, my favorite is “John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal Burner,” the final story in the book. It’s a comic story about the play between the Raven King, a charcoal maker, and a variety of Christian figures. I chuckled at “The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse,” which is set in the town of Wall from Neil Gaiman’s Stardust: I love to see my favorite authors collaborate.

As in the novel that precedes these stories, Clarke plays with concepts of femininity, magic, learning, power, manners, history, and morals. She erases the silly, romanticized visions of faeries and replaces them with portraits of dangerous, powerful, careless otherworld people. Her heroines subvert the rules laid out for them, however secretly. Her heroes win more often through study and thoughtfulness than force. I love her England. I want more of it.

Clarke’s audiobooks are some of the finest examples of the art I’ve come across. The author’s stories and language are beautiful and entrancing, and the readers are engaging, precise, entertaining, skilled with accents, and a joy to listen to. I can’t wait for Clarke’s next book, and when it does come out, it will be hard to decide whether to read it on paper first or listen to the audiobook version first.

 Four Souls

 Author: Louise Erdrich

 Reader: Anna Fields

 Short Review: Four Souls is a belated sequel to Tracks, and thus the continuation of the story of Fleur Pillager—one of the recurrent characters in Erdrich’s series of novels that follow an Ojibwe tribe. Read starkly and beautifully by Anna Fields, the plot is intricate and engrossing, the characters clear and interesting, and Erdrich’s writing is precise and energized. The story follows Fleur Pillager as she seeks revenge against a man who stole and then destroyed her land.

Long Review: This book centers around a character who never speaks her own story to us. Instead, several characters describe Fleur’s actions and possible motivations to us. We have their guesses about her decisions and feelings. “Four Souls” was Fleur’s mother’s name, and it’s the name Fleur takes for herself at the outset of the story. The name allows her to be ruthless when she needs, loving when she needs, and to somehow retain some kernel of her self throughout.

Fields must speak in the voices of multiple narrators throughout her reading of this work, and she does a beautiful job. Nanapush, who opens the novel, is a tribal elder and Fleur’s grandfather. John James Mauser is the developer and real estate magnate Fleur seeks to destroy. Polly Elizabeth is Mauser’s sister-in-law and Fleur’s employer. Margaret Kashpaw is Nanapush’s sharp-tongued wife. Nanapush and Polly Elizabeth do most of the speaking in the novel, and Fields switches deftly between their voices. I was very happy with Fields’ narration, but I can imagine that some people would be annoyed by her reading of Nanapush. Her natural speaking voice isn’t particularly deep, so her timbre doesn’t sound naturally male when she voices him. To my ear, Field’s performance as Margaret erases any qualms I might have about her voicing Nanapush.

I think Erdrich’s work translates particularly well to audio format because she is so interested in story-telling itself. Nanapush returns to novel after novel to play the roll of chief storyteller. He is Erdrich’s recurrent personification of the oral tradition, and he serves her well. In one of his most important lines, Nanapush asserts their tribal need to maintain Ojibwe land:

“When I look at the scope and drift of our history, I see that we have come out of it with something, at least. This scrap of earth. This ishkonigan. This left over. We’ve got this and as long as we can hold on to it we will be some sort of people.”

It’s the need to maintain that scrap of land that sets Fleur on her initial quest, and that dedication to conservation is one of the things that draws readers to Erdrich and to Native American fiction in general. Erdrich refuses to fall back on stereotypes about Native connections to the Earth, though, and emphasizes real, practical reasons Nanapush and the other residents of Little No Horse want to retain their land and language. Fleur fights for herself and for her people, and also seems to fight against wanton development in general. For tree-hugging dirt-worshippers like me, that’s quite a compelling story in and of itself. Intertwining it with stories of love and betrayal and self-sacrifice just makes it richer and more sustaining.

Short Review: Atwood’s Governor General’s Award-winning bildungsroman about girls’ cruelty to other girls, art, childhood, and memory; read crisply by Barbara Caruso. The book follows Elaine Risley, an artist, as she remembers her youth in Canada while preparing for a retrospective of her artwork. It is heartbreaking and beautiful, which makes it hard to listen to at times. Pain is perhaps more real when it’s expressed out loud–this isn’t a fun listen, but it’s a very good one.

Long Review: I love this book, and it breaks my heart over and over again. I hate the concept of “chick lit,” but I do believe there are certain books that speak so clearly of girls’ and women’s experiences that they are ours to read and know–this is one of those books. In a way, I worry about who reads it, because I don’t want anyone to use this sharp, brilliant novel as proof of how evil girls are to other girls. Atwood deserves better, and girls and women deserve more credit than that.

Caruso was well-cast in this role. Her reading is never sappy, never self-pitying. She is a journalist reporting on her own youth and life, and she’s as hard on herself as she is on Cordelia, her nemesis and friend. Elaine repeatedly points the failures of her own memory–as a young adult, she had forgotten about her friends’ cruelty to her. As she ages different things trigger painful memories to resurface, and she is forced to realize that she tolerated intolerable things, and to wonder why.

The book is structured as a series of flashbacks, which is perhaps the only way to accurately portray the reflection on and reclamation of childhood memories by adults. The flashbacks are entwined in a story of Elaine’s preparation for a retrospective gallery show of her art. Elaine as a child is fragile, confused, and off-kilter much of the time. As an adult, Elaine seems solid, organized, and confident in most things. She pieces her memories together with a thesis in mind, it seems, and has no trouble convincing us of her victimization and recovery. I find it particularly intriguing that Atwood and Caruso conspire to make us fall so totally for this character who isn’t trying to elicit sympathy or demand justice. Elaine just states the truth of her memories and moves forward, interested in making sense of her experience without wallowing in it. We should all aspire to be such memoirists.

Long Review: I’m guessing a lot of readers aren’t familiar with either O’Faolain or Molloy, and that breaks my heart. Molloy is an accomplished Irish actress who established her career at the Abbey and Gate Theaters in Dublin, went on the the Royal Shakespeare Company, and then became one of the go-to actors for Brian Friel’s plays. Her voice, diction, accent, and performance are ideal for Kathleen, the speaker and protagonist.

O’Faolain, an Irish journalist, rose to prominence by publishing her first memoir, Are You Somebody? She shocked the remaining traditionalists in Ireland with the book by openly speaking of her bisexuality, her sexual freedom, her break from the church, and so much else that so many people were expected to leave in the closet at home. Sadly, we won’t have the chance to hear much more from O’Faolain. She died this May of cancer, having published her two memoirs, the engrossing The Story of Chicago May, and this lovely novel.

The book is told in the voice of Caitlin de Burca/Kathleen Burke, an ex-pat Irish travel writer living in London; questioning her career and personal life; dealing with various griefs; researching an obscure bit of Irish history, and trying to use it as the basis for her first historical novel. Kathleen’s best friend dies, and she finds herself lonely, separated from family, and essentially anchorless. She decides to go home to Ireland and research a sensational upper-class divorce case that took place in the wake of the potato famine. During her research, she winds up befriending a bristly small-town librarian, an innkeeper and his family, and a married middle-aged ex-pat who becomes her lover.

As the novel progresses, O’Faolain includes excerpts from the book her protagonist is writing. Through these, and through Kathleen’s own thoughts and discussions of sexual mores, adultery, pregnancy, motherhood, and love, we get an interesting view of women’s sexuality in Ireland over more than a century. One of the things I found particularly touching about the book is that Kathleen is open about her own transgressions against friends, family members, and fidelity itself. She doesn’t make excuses for her behavior, but does look into its genesis. That is still a rare thing in literary fiction. We live in a world that still pillories sexually transgressive women, and Ireland is perhaps even more judgmental about women’s promiscuity than the US is, if that’s possible. O’Faolain’s plot breaks from that arc. Instead, Kathleen thinks about her relationship to men and transgression and chooses a path for herself.

I always favor authors who sketch flawed but lovable characters, and O’Faolain is certainly in that camp. Add to that her decision to write about Ireland, passion between middle-aged–and even elderly–characters, historical research, and about the state of Irish women’s rights over the last century and a half and you get a novel tailor made for, well, me. Thanks Nuala O’Faolain–you have given me yet another wonderful gift through your writing. I will cherish it. And I will miss you–you were a gem.

Author: Roddy Doyle

Reader: Ger Ryan

Short Review: A novel featuring the engaging lead character from Doyle’s The Woman Who Walked Into Doors gloriously read in the perfect Dublin accent by Ger Ryan.

Long Review: Paula Spencer is a recovering alcoholic, recovering longtime victim of domestic violence, widow, house-cleaner, and mother weighed down by a lot of grief. The story could be awash in bathos, but it’s not. It escapes the bathetic because Doyle knows how to write, and Ryan knows how to act, and Paula appears to be winning her own personal war.

I’ve been a fan of Doyle’s for years, in part because he is able to write women far better than a lot of male writers can. I don’t know if we’re really that hard to understand, or if a lot of men who write never take the trouble to learn how to do it. Returning to Paula as his protagonist for a second novel must have been difficult–these can’t have been light books to write. But I love seeing her return, and I particularly love listening to this book because it is so personal and succinct. I lived in Dublin for a while once upon a time, and a North Dublin accent is one of my favorite in the world, in part because it is so often paired with plain, sharp speech in my experience. As an audio book, Paula Spencer is great because the prose is spare yet engaging, the characters are limited, and the plot is easy to follow. All of that combines to allow Ryan to really act as she narrates, and she is an immensely talented actor.

I’m sure some people would be turned off by the weight of the story–addiction and abuse are hard subjects to deal with for so many of us. But I don’t think that should scare anyone off. Yes, Paula Spencer and her kids live a hard life. But it’s a life worth seeing, and hearing. This book displays Paula’s triumphs, however small.

Overall, what I love most about the book is that it is entirely free of hagiography and martyrdom. Doyle doesn’t canonize Paula. Paula doesn’t canonize Paula. And Paula’s kids certainly don’t canonize Paula. Everyone in the book is deeply flawed, but they’re not wallowing in their failings or denying them. They just live, however they can, and try to be as decent as they can. It’s a more accurate portrayal of addiction and abuse than I’ve seen in a long time, and I think that makes it much more worthwhile than most of the pop-psychology influenced stuff on those subjects I’ve read.

The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus

Author: Margaret Atwood

Reader: Laural Merlington

Short Review: Margaret Atwood’s retelling of a portion of The Odyssey in Penelope’s voice, her contribution to the Canongate Myth Series, read by Laurel Merlington.

Long Review: I am a mythology nut. A buff. A, well, obsessive kook. I know this. I’m fine with this. And when I learned that I had missed the bus–that this series of books was underway and that it kicked off without me–I felt like I had caught someone kicking my dog.

Atwood, of course, retells Penelope’s story with a wonderful feminist twist. Atwood’s Penelope stands up for the maids, and criticizes her wayward husband and disingenuous suitors. She argues that her supposed beauty has long since faded, and that all of the men in the story are arguing over her for entirely unromantic reasons.

Laurel Merlington’s narration is engaging, sharp, and humorous. Her method of voicing the chorus is a bit shrill at times, but that seems fitting considering the messages they carry.

This was a good listen–I burned through it in an afternoon of puttering around my studio, and immediately missed my Ancient Greek companions. I look forward to listening to more audio books from the Canongate Myth Series.

Housekeeping: A Novel

Author: Marilynne Robinson

Read by: Becket Royce

Short Review: Robinson’s prize-winning, gorgeous, intricate novel about women and the fragility of family, and of sanity, and the need to create and maintain a sense of home, no matter what happens. It is read well, if not perfectly, by Beckett Royce.

Long Review: I love this novel. I’m not the only one–it was nominated for a Pulitzer and won the PEN/Hemingway Award when it was published in 1980. Robinson is immensely talented, and the characters she creates are intricate and engaging and often surprising. My heart ached for Ruthie and Lucille and Sylvie, and their shattered family in their cruel town. Robinson writes with an intricacy and specificity that I find breath-taking. I love the book on paper, so was interested to hear it as an audio book.

Beckett Royce has a good voice, and is a clear reader. But she had a vocal habit that grated on me. There is a way some people pause when they speak that they probably intend as a display of earnestness, but to my ear sounds false. Royce used it a lot as she read. And since she is essentially playing Ruthie as the reader for this book, it bothered me because Ruthie is reticent and not one to play at earnestness. Maybe I just love the book too much to hear it in someone else’s voice, rather than in the voice I imagine for Ruthie.

That said, I think books like this one–books that follow a single, engaging narrator, are some of the best candidates to become audio books. Maybe I’m,the only one who will find fault with Royce’s performance. I’d certainly be interested to hear other people’s reaction to her reading.