Author: Kendra Winchester

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.

Rita Todacheene works as a crime scene photographer for the Albuquerque police force. She’s the best photographer they have, but there’s a reason for that: Rita can see the ghosts of the dead. Rita was raised on the Navajo reservation by her grandmother, who tried to teach her not to talk to the spirits that she saw. But Rita can’t seem to help it. She just wants them to rest and leave her alone, and the spirits always seem quite persistent. The novel jumps back and forth between Rita working on cases in the present day and her childhood living with her grandmother.

Admittedly, I am a sucker for a story where people can see ghosts. There’s just something delightfully creepy about the set up for me. I loved Rita as a character. She’s not the gung ho type. She’d rather not be solving crime or taking photos of the aftermaths of violent attacks. But she needs a job. She’s practical and down to earth — at least, as practical as one can be when they see ghosts. Charley Flyte does an excellent job performing the audiobook. She perfectly captures Rita’s narrative voice, striking just the right balance between the exposition parts of the novel and the character’s emotional depth.

In the English countryside in the summer of 1950, Flavia finds a dead man in the yard of her family’s crumbling manor home. Soon her father is suspected for the murder and Flavia must solve the crime and clear her father’s name. Jayne Entwistle is the perfect choice of narrator for Flavia, who is far too straightforward and practical for her years. She adores chemistry, especially all things poisons and poison compounds. Flavia imagines herself a woman of science, and Entwistle performs Flavia’s perspective with all the brusk British nature that Flavia’s story requires. If you like this book, then you should definitely check out the other ten books in the series.