This summer, SYNC will be providing two free teen audiobooks each week from April 27th to August 16th. Each week will focus on a specific theme, pairing a classic YA title with a more modern YA title. These two titles will be available to download for free this week only (from 8/10 to 8/17) at the SYNC website. The sixteenth week will start on Thursday, August 10th with Shadowshaper . The theme for the sixteenth and last week is “Changes.”
Anika Noni Rose’s narration rolls with every twist and turn in this fantasy, creating a variety of voices, moving flawlessly between English and Spanish, and bringing to life the main character. Sierra’s summer project, painting a mural on an abandoned building in her Brooklyn neighborhood, shifts into a mystery that leads her to her magical heritage. Rose focuses listeners on Sierra’s multicultural urban world. Her expressive delivery highlight Sierra’s curiosity and intelligence as she does research, follows clues, discovers the power of her own art, and tries to outwit a killer who has turned his attention on her. Cultural exploration, magic, and action blend to form a lively listen. The library owns this in book, ebook, and eaudiobook formats.
“Looking on oneself as something alien, forgetting the sight, remembering the gaze,” wrote Kafka, perhaps presaging his most famous tale, in which a workaday traveling salesman wakes one day to find he is now a huge vermin. Kafka expertly portrays the vagaries of the human heart–all of its sad glory and tiny selfishness–in a recording that the gifted Martin Jarvis elevates to an audio classic, employing his storytelling skills and knowing inflections in a lively and charming narration occasionally punctuated by scratchy, whimsical violins. Jarvis has firmly established himself as a source of finely nuanced theater of the mind. This unforgettable audio movie is vivid and disturbing, shot through with black humor. The library owns this in book and eaudiobook formats.