Audiobooks 03/18/21

Eighteen-year-old Daunis Fontaine is a biracial, unenrolled tribal member with dreams of studying medicine who puts her future on hold to care for her ailing mother. She has a crush on Jamie, the new recruit on her brother’s hockey team, but lately she gets the sense that Jamie might be hiding something. Everything comes to light when Daunis witnesses a murder and gets pulled into an undercover criminal investigation into a new lethal drug. She secretly pursues her own investigation on the side, using her knowledge of chemistry and Ojibwe traditional medicine to suss out the culprits. But the deceptions and the deaths keep coming, and “Daunis must learn what it means to be a strong Anishinaabe kwe (Ojibwe woman) and how far she’ll go for her community, even if it tears apart the only world she’s ever known.” (YA fiction, mystery)

Read by Isabella Star LaBlanc, a Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota stage and screen actor who played Tiger Lily in a Shakespeare Theatre Production of “Peter Pan and Wendy.” This is her first audiobook credit that I could find, I’m excited to listen!

Speaking of Shakespeare, I love me a reimagining of The Bard’s tales, don’t you? This collections brings together 15 acclaimed YA writers as they put their modern spin on ol’ Willy’s celebrated classics. Contributors include Dahlia Adler (reimagining The Merchant of Venice), Melissa Bashardoust (A Winter’s Tale), Patrice Caldwell (Hamlet), Brittany Cavallaro (Sonnet 147), Anna-Marie McLemore (Midsummer Night’s Dream), Samantha Mabry (Macbeth), Tochi Onyebuchi (Coriolanus), Mark Oshiro (Twelfth Night), and more!

Read by Lily Anderson, Ariel Blake, Patrice Caldwell, Caitlin Davies, Ramon de Ocampo, Almarie Guerra, Cary Hite, North Homewood, Barrie Kreinik, Nikki Massoud, Joy McCullough, Mark Oshiro, Avi Roque, Julia Whelan, and Landon Woodson

Daisy Patel is a software engineer who “understands lists and logic better than bosses and boyfriends” (I love that). She has her life plan all mapped out and it doesn’t include the marriage her matchmaking family expects of her, so she asks her childhood crush to be her fake fiancé. It just so turns out that this crush of hers, venture capitalist Liam Murphy, is in a bind of his own that could be remedied with a fake engagement: his inheritance is contingent on being married. A marriage of convenience will solve both of their problems, right? I love me a fake dating/marriage rom-com! (romance, romantic comedy)

Read by my fave Soneela Nankani! (His Only Wife by Peace Adzo Medie, The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey)

Beauregard “Bug” Montage is trying to keep his head above water and do right by the people he loves. He’s an honest mechanic who runs his own shop, he’s a devoted husband, and he’s a loving father to his three children. Bug is also knows as the best wheelman on the East Coast, but that life is behind him now. At least it was until a new auto shop moved into town and ate up his clientele. Now bug owes three months of rent on his shop and the bills keep piling up. So when he’s approached by someone from his former life, a shady character who did him real dirty on a job, Bug knows he shouldn’t trust him when he promises this new job will be an easy payout. He knows he should say no, but he can’t. So he agrees: one last job and then he’ll be out of the game for good. Guess how well that turns out?

Holy sh*t. The car chase and heist scenes are so intense, more than I forgot they could be in in book form. I listened to this one primarily while driving and kept clutching my steering wheel with white knuckles like I was the getaway driver in an illegally modified car. I was wound up tight for whole chapters at a time hoping the cops wouldn’t catch up, that the car wouldn’t crash, that the bad guys wouldn’t win (are there… any good guys?), that Beauregard’s wife and kids would stay safe. And that brings me to the most compelling part of the book: Bug as a character study. You root for Bug, but he’s a complicated man. He’s flawed and makes a lot of poor choices, some that feel avoidable and others made in desperation with his back against a wall. You feel for him even when he goes down the path we as readers so clearly see is not going to end well, and recognize that so much of his experience as a Black man in the south plays into the choices made available to him in the first place.

Lastly, we need to talk about this narrator. Adam Lazarre-White is an actor, writer, director, and producer known for roles in film and television like Scandal, The Young and the Restless and Ocean’s Thirteen (how fitting). And sir, I just wanna know *Rihanna voice* wheeeeere have you been all my life? How dare you be this perfect!? There’s an interview with S.A. Cosby at the end of the audiobook where he’s asked about the performance, and his response was to wonder if Adam Lazarre-White had been in his head while he was writing the book. It felt like he was Bug, and then like he was the rest of the characters, too. His delivery is so natural, effortless, so guttural in those tense moments and calm in moments of (charged, so charged) stillness. He nailed it. He just nailed it! This is easily one of the best audiobooks I’ve listened to in years.

If you’re looking for dark, gritty, nuanced heist thriller that feels like The Fast and the Furious + The Italian Job + the Starz show Power but set in the south with fantastic, immersive narration, pick this up.