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A River of Stars
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Jennifer Lim
- Length: 10 hrs and 54 mins
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Publisher's summary
National Best Seller
In a powerful debut about modern-day motherhood, immigration, and identity, a pregnant Chinese woman stakes a claim to the American dream in California.
“Utterly absorbing.” (Celeste Ng)
“A marvel of a first novel.” (O: The Oprah Magazine)
“The most eye-opening literary adventure of the year.” (Entertainment Weekly)
Named one of the best books of the year by:
The Washington Post
NPR
Real Simple
Holed up with other mothers-to-be in a secret maternity home in Los Angeles, Scarlett Chen is far from her native China, where she worked in a factory and fell in love with the married owner, Boss Yeung. Now she’s carrying his baby. To ensure that his child - his first son - has every advantage, Boss Yeung has shipped Scarlett off to give birth on American soil. As Scarlett awaits the baby’s arrival, she spars with her imperious housemates. The only one who fits in even less is Daisy, a spirited pregnant teenager who is being kept apart from her American boyfriend.
Then a new sonogram of Scarlett’s baby reveals the unexpected. Panicked, she goes on the run by hijacking a van - only to discover that she has a stowaway: Daisy, who intends to track down the father of her child. The two flee to San Francisco’s bustling Chinatown, where Scarlett will join countless immigrants desperately trying to seize their piece of the American dream. What Scarlett doesn’t know is that her baby’s father is not far behind her.
A River of Stars is a vivid examination of home and belonging and a moving portrayal of a woman determined to build her own future.
Praise for A River of Stars:
“Vanessa Hua’s story spins with wild fervor, with charming protagonists fiercely motivated by maternal and survival instincts.” (USA Today)
“A River of Stars is the best of all worlds: part buddy cop adventure, part coming-of-age story and part ode to female friendship.” (NPR)
“Hua’s epic A River of Stars follows a pair of pregnant Chinese immigrant women - two of the more vibrant characters I’ve come across in a while - on the lam from Los Angeles to San Francisco’s Chinatown.” (R. O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries, in Esquire)
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Little Girl Lost
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- By: Wendy Corsi Staub
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 11 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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May 1968 - On a murky pre-dawn Mother’s Day, sinister secrets play out miles apart in New York City. In Harlem, a church janitor finds a newborn in a basket. In Brooklyn, an elusive serial killer prowls slumbering families, leaving a trail of blood. These seemingly unrelated lives - and deaths - are destined to intersect on a distant, blood-soaked day. October, 1987 - Reeling from shocking personal discoveries, two strangers navigate a world where nothing is as it seems.
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Not Up To Staub's Standards
- By Gracie on 12-29-18
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The Widow of Wall Street
- A Novel
- By: Randy Susan Meyers
- Narrated by: Susan Bennett
- Length: 11 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Phoebe has loved Jake Pierce since childhood, and that love continues without hesitation while she watches him create a financial dynasty. But when Phoebe learns that her husband's triumphs are the result of an elaborate Ponzi scheme, her world unravels. Lies underpin her life and marriage. And as Jake's crime is uncovered, the world obsesses over her. Did she know her gilded life was fabricated by fraud?
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Here's a Miracle: Sympathy for Ruth Madoff
- By Godwillen on 05-24-17
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The Incarnations
- A Novel
- By: Susan Barker
- Narrated by: Timo Chen, Joy Osmanski
- Length: 14 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Who are you? You must be wondering. I am your soul mate, your old friend, and I have come back to this city of 16 million in search of you. So begins the first letter that falls into Wang's lap as he flips down the visor in his taxi. The letters that follow are filled with the stories of Wang's previous lives - from escaping a marriage to a spirit bride to being a slave on the run from Genghis Khan to living as a fisherman during the Opium Wars and being a teenager on the Red Guard during the cultural revolution.
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What was that you said?
- By cecil reniche-smith on 08-29-15
By: Susan Barker
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Secret Daughter
- By: Shilpi Somaya Gowda
- Narrated by: Soneela Nankani
- Length: 11 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Debut novelist Shilpi Somaya Gowda pens this compelling tale about two families, worlds apart, linked by one Indian child. After giving birth to a girl for a second time, impoverished Kavita must give her up to an orphanage. The baby, named Asha, is adopted by an American doctor and raised in California. But once grown, Asha decides to return to India.
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A Must Read
- By Stephanie on 06-08-11
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Her Body and Other Parties
- Stories
- By: Carmen Maria Machado
- Narrated by: Amy Landon
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.
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Beautiful
- By Anonymous User on 11-17-17
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Jerusalem Maiden
- By: Talia Carner
- Narrated by: Lise Bruneau
- Length: 12 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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In the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, a young Orthodox Jewish woman in the holy city of Jerusalem is expected to marry and produce many sons to help hasten the Messiah's arrival. While the feisty Esther Kaminsky understands her obligations, her artistic talent inspires her to secretly explore worlds outside her religion, to dream of studying in Paris - and to believe that God has a special destiny for her. When tragedy strikes her family, Esther views it as a warning from an angry God....
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No dreaming, No painting, No thinking . . .
- By Debbie on 04-18-15
By: Talia Carner
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The Daisy Children
- A Novel
- By: Sofia Grant
- Narrated by: Teri Schnaubelt
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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When Katie Garrett gets the news that she’s received an inheritance from the grandmother she hardly knew, it couldn’t have come at a better time. She flees Boston and travels to rural Texas. There, she’s greeted by her distant cousin Scarlett. Friendly and flamboyant, Scarlett couldn’t be more different from sensible Katie. And as they begin the task of sorting through their grandmother’s possessions, they discover letters and photographs that uncover the hidden truths about their shared history, and the long-forgotten tragedy of the New London school explosion of 1937 that binds them.
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Multigenerational storyline lacked dignity
- By John F. Oldani, Jr. on 06-07-24
By: Sofia Grant
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The Orphan Keeper
- By: Camron Wright
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Seven-year-old Chellamuthu's life - and his destiny - is forever changed when he is kidnapped from his village in Southern India and sold to the Lincoln Home for Homeless Children. His family is desperate to find him, and Chellamuthu anxiously tells the Indian orphanage that he is not an orphan, he has a mother who loves him. But he is told not to worry, he will soon be adopted by a loving family in America.
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5 Star Worthy
- By Kari on 10-26-16
By: Camron Wright
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When the Moon Is Low
- A Novel
- By: Nadia Hashimi
- Narrated by: Sneha Mathan, Neil Shah
- Length: 12 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Mahmoud’s passion for his wife, Fereiba, a schoolteacher, is greater than any love she’s ever known. But their happy, middle-class world implodes when their country is engulfed in war and the Taliban rises to power. Mahmoud, a civil engineer, becomes a target of the new fundamentalist regime and is murdered. Forced to flee Kabul with her three children, Fereiba must find a way to cross Europe and reach her sister’s family in England. With forged papers and help from kind strangers they meet along the way, Fereiba make a dangerous crossing into Iran under cover of darkness.
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Good story. Poor ending
- By Janine on 01-14-22
By: Nadia Hashimi
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You Know When the Men Are Gone
- By: Siobhan Fallon
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 5 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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In Fort Hood housing, like all army housing, you get used to hearing through the walls. You learn too much. And you learn to move quietly through your own small domain. You also know when the men are gone. As Siobhan Fallon shows in this collection of loosely interconnected short stories, each woman deals with her husband's absence differently.
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You know when you've got a great read!
- By Pamela Harvey on 01-22-11
By: Siobhan Fallon
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The Outcast
- By: Jolina Petersheim
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Rachel Stoltzfus never imagined she’d be the talk of her Old Order Mennonite community until whispers stir the moment her belly swells with new life. Unmarried and refusing to repent by naming the partner in her sin, Rachel feels the wrath of the religious sect as she is shunned by those she loves most and eventually forced to leave - driven out by her twin sister’s husband, the bishop. But secrets run deep in this cloistered community, and the bishop is hiding some of his own, threatening his conscience and his very soul.
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full story not the norm for amish fiction
- By susan on 09-15-13
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Hum If You Don't Know the Words
- By: Bianca Marais
- Narrated by: Katharine Lee McEwan, Bahni Turpin
- Length: 14 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Life under Apartheid has created a secure future for Robin Conrad, a 10-year-old white girl living with her parents in 1970s Johannesburg. In the same nation but worlds apart, Beauty Mbali, a Xhosa woman in a rural village in the Bantu homeland of the Transkei, struggles to raise her children alone after her husband's death. Both lives have been built upon the division of race, and their meeting should never have occurred...until the Soweto Uprising.
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Completely wrong accents
- By Debbie on 02-12-22
By: Bianca Marais
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A Killer Plot
- Books by the Bay Mystery Series #1
- By: Ellery Adams
- Narrated by: Karen White
- Length: 11 hrs
- Unabridged
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Olivia Limoges is the subject of constant gossip. Ever since her mysterious return to the small coastal town of Oyster Bay, North Carolina, Olivia has kept to herself, her dog, and her unfinished novel. With a little cajoling from charming writer Camden Ford, she agrees to join the Bayside Book Writers to break her writer's block and even make a few friends. But when townspeople start turning up dead with haiku poems left by the bodies, anyone with a flair for language is suddenly suspect.
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My new favorite Cozy Mystery Series!
- By Christina on 09-21-15
By: Ellery Adams
What listeners say about A River of Stars
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Trudi
- 05-16-20
Five star summer read
So much culturally interesting information woven into this fun interesting story. The narration was great as was the story and character development. I loved how Ms. Hua told the back story of almost every character in the book. Really a great summer read!
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1 person found this helpful
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- Barbara Voss
- 10-16-18
Wonderful surprise!
I really enjoyed this unexpected gem. The book unfolded in unexpected ways, and the characters developed in interesting and challenging directions.
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5 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Linda Juergensen
- 09-18-19
Could not put it down.
A beautiful story of many different kinds of love. Learned more of Chinese culture and many similarities.
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1 person found this helpful
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- J. J. Denison
- 08-23-18
Starts great but loses steam
Started out great and has a wonderful finale...but the middle section of the novel becomes tedious and drags. Jennifer Lim is a very good narrater.
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5 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Paula McLeod
- 03-06-19
Great book!
I loved listening to this book. The exclamations in Cantonese made it real for me. I would never have been able to translate by reading them myself. I was impressed by the enginuity and tenacity of the characters in their daily lives. It was a struggle for them, but they never have up!
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1 person found this helpful
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- JK
- 11-01-19
Ughhhh......
This was not one I would recommend picking up! The story took forever to get through. If it was a required read, I would have never finished it.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Criticalthinker
- 02-21-19
Immature writing, annoying narration
This is very much a first novel. The writing is uneven and often clunky. The Audible narrator’s song-song delivery made this listening experience a slog.
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2 people found this helpful