British actor Seema Bowri makes her narrating debut, her crisp, youthful voice an ideal match for 11-year-old Tamarind, a Bristol, England-raised girl meeting her late mother’s family for the first time. Her father, recently remarried and on his way to his honeymoon, arranges to leave...
*STARRED REVIEW A solemn drumbeat welcomes listeners to discover the Kapaemahu, four ancient Tahitian healers of Hawaii. Neither male nor female, “they were mahu—a mixture of both in mind, heart, and spirit.” The people built a monument in gratitude, but the “four great boulders” were eventually...
Zibby Owens’s third book is also her third narrator credit, as well as her debut for children. She relies on a delightfully playful twist channeling one of the world’s most familiar fairy tales, cleverly revealed in the final three words (no spoilers). “Being a princess isn’t...
Narrator Malik Rashad isn’t quite Kwame Onwuachi, who ideally narrated his original 2019 memoir – but here, that’s not necessarily a liability for younger audiences who might need a smidge more animation. Rashad affectingly channels Onwuachi, the self-described “black kid from the Bronx ...
“This is the book I wish I had as a teenager,” disability rights activist Alice Wong reveals, choosing 17 stories for this adaptation from the 37 in her 2020 original. As editor, Wong again reads her introduction. While none could dispute that Wong is a...
“I wanted to write a history book in disguise,” journalist and professor Sandy Tolan announces, “and to make it feel, throughout, like a good novel. Even though the story is true.” Tolan voiced his original; here Rami Medina makes his audiobook debut: his rich, youthful...
Paris-based journalist Dana Thomas adapts her 2019 erudite exposé for younger audiences, and also (again) narrates. For a writer careful enough to include phonetic guidelines – ”Maria Cornejo (pronounced “Cor-nay-ho”),” for example – her inconsistencies surprise: Ikeda is not “ai-kee-dah”; “Iris (pronounced “EEE-reece”)” is followed...
*STARRED REVIEW “Indians. We are so often imagined, but so infrequently well understood,” Anton Treuer’s opening sentence reads. As a Princeton-educated, Ojibwe professor with “one foot in the wigwam and one in the ivory tower,” Treuer “cannot speak for all Indians,” but he’s ready with “specific...
Until her death at 104 in 2018, Dovey Johnson Roundtree—“a Black woman born in the early twentieth century in the Jim Crow South” – shared a remarkable 24-year friendship with Katie McCabe, a self-described “white woman who came of age in 1950s Washington, DC.” Theirs...
The Synnott couple compress husband Mark’s 2019 bestseller to share with younger readers Alex Honnold’s thought-to-be-impossible feat of solo free climbing – as in no ropes, no harness! – Freerider, El Capitan’s notorious 3,000-feet vertical route in Yosemite National Park. Perhaps aware that adults might argue...
What’s immediately striking here is the casting of a woman to narrate: the titular rebel is the Polish hero – a man – Witold Pilecki. So, too, is the author, Jack Fairweather, who adapted his 2019 award-winning The Volunteer. The reasons for choosing a female...
Two decades after Tim Madigan wrote The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 about “the nation’s worst race war,” award-winning writer Hilary Beard heightens the event’s significance with amplified awareness of social justice, systemic racism, and critical race theory in this young...
*STARRED REVIEW David Grann’s adaptation of his 2017 mega-bestselling title of the same name has lost none of the urgency of the astounding original. Once upon a time, “the Osage were considered the wealthiest people per capita in the world,” a result of the oil beneath...
Over a decade and a half after its 2005 publication, the young readers edition of historian/journalist/music critic Jeff Chang’s seminal Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation seems almost overdue. The enhanced collaboration with historian/journalist/professor Dave "Davey D" Cook adds new generations...
*STARRED REVIEW For audiences familiar with the former NFL linebacker’s viral YouTube series, Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man, or those who might have already listened to the Emmanuel Acho-narrated audiobook of the same title, be assured that Landon Woodson’s performance in this young readers edition...
Benjamin Dreyer is delightful – as both author and narrator. His witty charm, his utter devotion to his craft (despite his comical protestations of “I hate grammar”!) are as immediately, joyfully recognizable in the ears as on the page. But, so much of Dreyer’s exacting erudition...
Serial collaborator Ruby Shamir fortuitously adapts journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s essential 2019 She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement, providing young journalists not only an illuminating window into the industry, but also empowering young women, especially, to speak...
Megan Rapinoe read her original 2020 memoir herself. Here, for the young readers edition, Nicole Lewis proves to be an optimal, dynamic match. Rapinoe made international headlines – and fielded a vicious media onslaught – when she emulated Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling protests against racism targeting...
Adapted from No Turning Back, award-winning Lebanese Australian journalist Rania Abouzeid narrows her focus here to younger characters forced to witness Syria’s decimation under President Bashar Hafez al-Assad. In 2011, Hanin is 8, the middle of three sisters living in the “fringes” of Damascus. Although the...
Jemar Tisby, who continues here as his own narrator, is a patient, thoughtful reader, remaining consistently gracious even when discussing egregious history and contemporary injustice. Tisby gets immediately personal, introducing his younger self when he realized that the predominantly white school had “all the nice...
