Bitter in the Mouth
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Narrated by:
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Jennifer Ikeda
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By:
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Monique Truong
About this listen
Growing up in the small town of Boiling Springs, North Carolina, in the 70’s and 80’s, Linda believes that she is profoundly different from everyone else, including the members of her own family. “What I know about you, little girl, would break you in two” are the cruel, mysterious last words that Linda’s grandmother ever says to her. Now in her 30s, Linda looks back at her past when she navigated her way through life with the help of her great-uncle Harper, who loves her and loves to dance, and her best friend Kelly, with whom Linda exchanges almost daily letters. The truth about my family was that we disappointed one another. When I heard the word “disappoint,” I tasted toast, slightly burnt. For as long as she can remember, Linda has experienced a secret sense—she can “taste” words, which have the power to disrupt, dismay, or delight. She falls for names and what they evoke: Canned peaches. Dill. Orange sherbet. Parsnip (to her great regret). But with crushes comes awareness. As with all bodies, Linda’s is a mystery to her, in this and in other ways. Even as Linda makes her way north to Yale and New York City, she still does not know the truth about her past. Then, when a personal tragedy compels Linda to return to Boiling Springs, she gets to know a mother she never knew and uncovers a startling story of a life, a family. Revelation is when God tells us the truth. Confession is when we tell it to him.
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Great representation of the time
- By AvidReader22 on 06-07-19
By: Alysia Abbott
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Native Country of the Heart
- A Memoir
- By: Cherríe Moraga
- Narrated by: Cherríe Moraga
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Native Country of the Heart is the writer and activist Cherrie Moraga's love letter to her "unlettered" mother. It begins with her mother, Elvira Isabel Moraga, who as a child, along with her siblings, was hired out by her own father to pick cotton in California's Imperial Valley. The lives of Cherrie and her mother, and of their people, are woven together in a story of critical reflection and deep personal revelation as Moraga charts her own coming to consciousness alongside the heartbreaking story of her mother's decline.
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a must read for all chicanx
- By Rachel Barnett on 04-28-19
By: Cherríe Moraga
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After the Parade
- By: Lori Ostlund
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Sensitive, big-hearted, and achingly self-conscious, 40-year-old Aaron Englund long ago escaped the confines of his Midwestern hometown, but he still feels like an outcast. After 20 years under the Pygmalion-like direction of his older partner, Walter, Aaron at last decides it is time to stop letting life happen to him and to take control of his own fate.
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Narrator
- By Barbara on 11-10-24
By: Lori Ostlund
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The Star Side of Bird Hill
- By: Naomi Jackson
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Two sisters, ages 10 and 16, are exiled from Brooklyn to Bird Hill in Barbados, after their mother can no longer care for them. The young Phaedra and her older sister, Dionne, live, for the summer of 1989, with their grandmother, Hyacinth, a midwife and practitioner of the local spiritual practice of obeah. Dionne spends the summer in search of love, testing her grandmother's limits, and wanting to go home. Phaedra explores Bird Hill, where her family has lived for generations.
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My absolute favorite book of all time
- By Eme on 07-16-15
By: Naomi Jackson
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Everything Is Illuminated
- By: Jonathan Safran Foer
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 11 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man—also named Jonathan Safran Foer—sets out to find the woman who might or might not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war, an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past.
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Astounding reading
- By bookworm123abc on 02-10-23
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Bettyville
- By: George Hodgman
- Narrated by: Jeff Woodman
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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When George Hodgman leaves Manhattan for his hometown of Paris, Missouri, he finds himself - an unlikely caretaker and near-lethal cook - in a head-on collision with his aging mother, Betty, a woman of wit and will. Will George lure her into assisted living? When hell freezes over. He can't bring himself to force her from the home both treasure - the place where his father's voice lingers, the scene of shared jokes, skirmishes, and, behind the dusty antiques, a rarely acknowledged conflict...
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Title Should Be Georgeville-It's All About George
- By Sara on 10-08-15
By: George Hodgman
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The Wednesday Sisters
- By: Meg Waite Clayton
- Narrated by: Julie Dretzin
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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For 35 years, Frankie, Linda, Kath, Brett, and Ally have met every Wednesday at the park near their homes in Palo Alto, California. Defined when they first meet by what their husbands do, the young homemakers and mothers are far removed from the Summer of Love that has enveloped most of the Bay Area in 1967.
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Loved it!
- By Denise Wallace on 06-26-09
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Before We Visit the Goddess
- By: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
- Narrated by: Sneha Mathan, Priya Ayyar, Vikas Adam
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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The daughter of a poor baker in rural Bengal, India, Sabitri yearns to get an education, but her family's situation means college is an impossible dream. Then an influential woman from Kolkata takes Sabitri under her wing, but her generosity soon proves dangerous after the girl makes a single unforgivable misstep. Years later, Sabitri's own daughter, Bela, haunted by her mother's choices, flees abroad with her political refugee lover - but the America she finds is vastly different from the country she'd imagined.
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Absolutely Worth a Credit
- By Texastanya on 08-27-16
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The Bastard of Istanbul
- By: Elif Shafak
- Narrated by: Laural Merlington
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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In her second novel written in English, Elif Shafak confronts her country's violent past in a vivid and colorful tale set in both Turkey and the United States. At its center is the "bastard" of the title, Asya, a 19-year-old woman who loves Johnny Cash and the French Existentialists, and the four sisters of the Kazanci family who all live together in an extended household in Istanbul.
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A tender gift from far away
- By Barbara on 11-07-07
By: Elif Shafak
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Shanda
- A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy
- By: Letty Cottin Pogrebin
- Narrated by: Dina Pearlman
- Length: 14 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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The word "shanda" is defined as shame or disgrace in Yiddish. This book, Shanda, tells the story of three generations of complicated, intense twentieth-century Jews for whom the desire to fit in and the fear of public humiliation either drove their aspirations or crushed their spirit. In her deeply engaging, astonishingly candid memoir, author and activist Letty Cottin Pogrebin exposes the fiercely-guarded lies and intricate cover-ups woven by dozens of members of her extended family.
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Beautifully Written!
- By Adele Aron Greenspun on 01-12-23
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The Waiting
- The True Story of a Lost Child, a Lifetime of Longing, and a Miracle for a Mother Who Never Gave Up
- By: Cathy LaGrow, Cindy Coloma - contributor
- Narrated by: Pamela Klein
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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In the summer of 1928, sixteen-year-old Minka was looking forward to a sewing class picnic. This would be a rare chance to put aside farm chores, don a pretty dress, and enjoy an outing with other girls. It would be a day to remember. And it was - but not in the way Minka had dreamed. Cornered by a stranger in the woods, the young girl was assaulted. Minka still believed that the stork brought babies; she would not discover for months that she was pregnant.
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Captivating and fantastic
- By John alexander on 10-03-19
By: Cathy LaGrow, and others
What listeners say about Bitter in the Mouth
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Renae
- 02-29-12
good but...
What did you like best about Bitter in the Mouth? What did you like least?
I really liked the story in this book but found the constant referencing to food as she spoke to be annoying after a while. I get that this is the theme of the book, but as a listener, it can get tedious.
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Overall
- Pamela Harvey
- 12-24-10
Not a linear story line
Is this the new trend in novels? A non-linear story line? Perhaps this book is or has been a critical success but not a commercial one. Haven't seen it in stores.
There is no specific story line, and it you're basically reading an unstructured fictional memoir. However the good news is that you can pick it up and put it down at any time and you haven't lost any plot details.
But on balance I liked it as a good companion to a workout, gardening, household project, etc. Something to listen to.
It's basically about upper middle class angst mixed with a "coming of age" theme. I couldn't relate to most of the issues, even though I have a similar background, and those issues that I did find relevant were dropped as quickly as they came up. That's the character of this listen - pick up a story line here, then drop it, maybe or maybe not pick it up again at a later stage with no info on what happened in between. However this is one of the reasons I read, as it always amazes me to have a window on the vast spectrum of what people take away from situations.
On the plus side: I found the mention of food flavors that the protagonist picks up from specific words to be interesting and not intrusive at all, sometimes hilarious, adding irony to the writing and to the reading, whereas I could see how that aspect of the narration might bother some. I also give high marks to the narration in general.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Renae Perry
- 02-29-12
good but...
What did you like best about Bitter in the Mouth? What did you like least?
I really liked the story in this book but found the constant referencing to food as she spoke to be annoying after a while. I get that this is the theme of the book, but as a listener, it can get tedious.
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- Amazon Customer
- 07-23-19
Difficult
Good story line , but torturous to listen to passages mimicking the disorder Linda dealt with. Almost abandoned the narration several times. Ending was not rewarding enough to compensate for distraction of the above mentioned passages.
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- SamanthaG
- 12-19-12
Depressing
I listened to the first half of the book only and found it to be depressing and boring - too much adolescent angst. I found that the synesthesia that Linda experienced was just a distracting contrivance; it had no other purpose that I could divine - sort of like gratuitous sex or violence.
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- Kate Anderson
- 11-06-11
"Tasting Words" made this hard to hear!
The author's heroine "tastes" words; this is called synthesia. This made the book terribly annoying to hear. Sentences were broken up with the "taste" of certain words. This, for example, is an excerpt: "She comesapplebutter over herehardboiledegg everyRitzcracker week, but only for a cupmacaroniandcheese of..." and so on. I found this horribly hard to listen to and I don't think the performer could have done much about that. But I also found the reading flat, as if the performer knew that this device was a contrivance many readers couldn't get past. Like me. I stopped listening to it, but since I wanted to know why the book got so many great reviews for the story, I looked online for a synopsis. I saw that in the text of the book, italics are placed to describe the taste the heroine senses for particular foods. However, the words still run together and I don't think I would have liked to read this book anymore that I wanted to hear it.
I think the story itself was a good one, but I couldn't get past the "tasting" of the words.
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2 people found this helpful