This summer, SYNC will be providing two free teen audiobooks each week from April 26th to July 25th. 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 4/26 to 5/3) at the SYNC website. The first week will start on Thursday, April 26th with The Great War . The theme for the first week is “History inspired stories.”
Physical items from WWI inspired this collection of 11 short stories, but no visuals are necessary to bring these powerful generation-spanning tales to life. The listener will recognize the accents of Scots, Aussies, African-American, French, Irish, and English characters as six different narrators (one per story) reveal uniquely personal tolls of war through the eyes of soldiers, siblings, children, families, and young workers. After each fictional story, a narrator briskly describes the actual item that inspired it, for example, a helmet, compass, or butter dish. With a death toll of approximately 17 million and another 20 million wounded, no one in the Allied Countries was unaffected. Listeners will also be greatly affected by these compelling stories of loss, luck, patriotism, and perseverance at war and at home. The library owns this in book format as well.
Narrator Graham Halstead deftly meets the challenge of re-creating the meeting of Charlotte Holmes and Jamie Watson, the great-great-great-grandchildren of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. This first of a trilogy is told from the perspective of Jamie. It takes murder to bring the two together when they are accused of killing a classmate. Halstead skillfully captures the intelligent, aloof Holmes and the more appealing but uncertain Watson. Listeners will enjoy hearing references to several actual Holmes stories as the 21st-century Holmes and Watson sift through clues, looking for the murderer. The library owns this title in book and CD audiobook formats.