This summer, SYNC will be providing two free teen audiobooks each week from May 5th to August 11th. Each week will focus on a specific theme, pairing a classic YA title with a more modern one. This week starts Thursday, May 26th with Every Last Word by Tamara Ireland Stone and Egg and Spoon by Gregory Maguire. These two titles will be available to download for free this week only (from 5/26 to 6/02) at the SYNC website. The theme for this second week is “Girls raise voices strong enough to shed light–or darkness.”
Amy Rubinate invites listeners to enter the inner and outer worlds of 16-year-old Samantha McAllister. Rubinate conveys Sam’s anxiety as she curries favor with a clique-ish set of friends and their mean-girl leader. She dramatizes Sam’s inner struggles as she hides her compulsive behaviors, finding her stress relieved only by competitive swimming and comforting discussions with her therapist. Sam’s life begins to change on the first day of her junior year when a mysterious student introduces her to the Poet’s Corner, a secret room where student share poetry and music. There Sam finds artistic freedom, love, friendship—and a problem more frightening than any she’s faced before. Rubinate’s characterizations and a surprising ending enhance this story. The library owns this in both book and ebook format.
Set in tsarist Russia, this story combines historical fiction and folklore and is told by a self-proclaimed “unreliable scribe” who writes from within a tower prison. Narrator Michael Page creates two girls—an earnest and believable Elena and a youthful, cultured Ekaterina—one peasant, the other privileged, yet so alike that their lives are exchanged with little notice. Great Aunt Sophia is haughty and imperious, while her mirror character, Baba Yaga the witch, is a capricious mix of lunacy, joy, and menace. Page especially shines as the story’s narrator. The character may be unreliable, but we believe his aged and patrician voice and hang on to his every measured word as he challenges us to ponder the nature of fate. The library owns this in book, CD audiobook, and Playaway formats.
Check out the rest of the May ⎼ June SYNC schedule here… you can even get text alerts about upcoming titles!
