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 YA title. This week starts Thursday, June 16th with How It Went Down by Kekla Magoon and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson. These two titles will be available to download for free this week only (from 6/16 to 6/23) at the SYNC website. The theme for this week is “American history past and in the making.”
Cherise Boothe anchors this production with her performance as world-weary Jennica, a teen we meet when she tries to save her schoolmate, Tariq Johnson, after he’s shot in broad daylight. In the wake of Tariq’s death, a full cast alternates between points of view as diverse as that of the shooter, who believed Tariq was armed, and that of the Reverend Alabaster Sloan, who comes to town in the wake of the tragedy to bolster his political career. As Tariq’s family, other teens, and neighborhood stalwarts fail to agree on the facts or on what they mean, the full-cast approach highlights the way people’s expectations and assumptions influence what they see and believe. Timely, but also timeless in its exploration of the mysteries at the core of being human. The library also has this in book format as well.
This 1912 novel is a fictional autobiography of an unnamed biracial man, with lessons and observations that are still fresh today. Alan Bomar Jones performs in a smooth voice. He adopts cultured, barely inflected tones for the narrative and the protagonist’s dialogue, while using strong Southern and New York accents for the dialogue of other African-Americans. Jones’s uninflected Spanish, French, and German phrases contrast sharply with Johnson’s descriptions of the protagonist’s near-native fluency. Full of sophisticated vocabulary, thoughtful ruminations, and detailed observations, the autobiography is replete with long discussions of race and discrimination as the hero travels throughout the South, New York, Boston, and Europe. Author James Weldon Johnson was a Harlem Renaissance writer as well as an educator, musician, and lawyer. The library does not currently own any copies of this title at this time, but we would be more than happy to request a copy for you from one of the libraries in our reciprocal borrowing system.
Check out the rest of the June SYNC schedule here… you can even get text alerts about upcoming titles!
