Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Grace Blewer
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By:
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Chris Bohjalian
About this listen
A heartbreaking, wildly inventive, and moving novel narrated by a teenage runaway, from the best-selling author of Midwives and The Sandcastle Girls.
Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands is the story of Emily Shepard, a homeless teen living in an igloo made of ice and trash bags filled with frozen leaves. Half a year earlier, a nuclear plant in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom had experienced a cataclysmic meltdown, and both of Emily's parents were killed. Devastatingly, her father was in charge of the plant, and the meltdown may have been his fault. Was he drunk when it happened? Thousands of people are forced to flee their homes in the Kingdom; rivers and forests are destroyed; and Emily feels certain that, as the daughter of the most hated man in America, she is in danger. So instead of following the social workers and her classmates after the meltdown, Emily takes off on her own for Burlington, where she survives by stealing, sleeping on the floor of a drug dealer's apartment, and inventing a new identity for herself - an identity inspired by her favorite poet, Emily Dickinson. When Emily befriends a young homeless boy named Cameron, she protects him with a ferocity she didn't know she had. But she still can't outrun her past, can't escape her grief, can't hide forever - and so she comes up with the only plan that she can.
A story of loss, adventure, and the search for friendship in the wake of catastrophe, Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands is one of Chris Bohjalian's finest novels to date - breathtaking, wise, and utterly transporting.
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By: Domingo Martinez
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May We Be Forgiven
- By: A. M. Homes
- Narrated by: Andy Paris
- Length: 20 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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May We Be Forgiven, a darkly comic novel of 21st-century domestic life, stars Harold Silver, a historian who's always been jealous of his successful brother, George. But when the hot-tempered George is institutionalized for committing a violent act, Harold finds himself comforting his brother's wife and children. What follows is a scathing examination of a family so fractured it may never be whole again.
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Give this one a try!
- By JWB on 02-13-13
By: A. M. Homes
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Marlena
- A Novel
- By: Julie Buntin
- Narrated by: Emma Galvin
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Everything about 15-year-old Cat's new town in rural Michigan is lonely and off-kilter until she meets her neighbor, the manic, beautiful, pill-popping Marlena. Cat, inexperienced and desperate for connection, is quickly lured into Marlena's orbit by little more than an arched eyebrow and a shake of white-blond hair. As the two girls turn the untamed landscape of their desolate small town into a kind of playground, Cat catalogues a litany of firsts - first drink, first cigarette, first kiss - while Marlena's habits harden and calcify.
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A Brilliant, Agonizing Portrait of a Young Woman
- By Sudi on 06-06-17
By: Julie Buntin
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The Hour I First Believed
- A Novel
- By: Wally Lamb
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 25 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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When high-school teacher Caelum Quirk and his wife, Maureen, move to Littleton, Colorado, they both get jobs at Columbine High School. In April 1999, while Caelum is away, Maureen finds herself in the library at Columbine, cowering in a cabinet and expecting to be killed. Miraculously, she survives. But when Caelum and Maureen flee to an illusion of safety on the Quirk family's Connecticut farm, they discover that the effects of chaos are not easily put right.
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excellent all around yarn
- By G. on 01-10-09
By: Wally Lamb
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She Got Up Off the Couch
- By: Haven Kimmel
- Narrated by: Haven Kimmel
- Length: 8 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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When we last saw Zippy, she was oblivious to the storm that was brewing in her home. Her mother, Delonda, had literally just gotten up off the couch and ridden her rickety bicycle down the road. Her dad was off somewhere, gambling or "working." And Zippy was lost in her own fabulous world of exploring the fringes of Moorland, Indiana.
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Great fun !!
- By Kim on 04-20-11
By: Haven Kimmel
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Driftwood
- A Novel
- By: Elizabeth Dutton
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Dutton
- Length: 6 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Los Angeles, California: Clem Jasper is a trust fund kid with a world famous rock musician for a father. When he dies suddenly (playing ping pong) she discovers he's left her a strange legacy: a series of letters that take her on a mysterious road trip around California. Ignoring her aunt's suggestion that she pitch the trip as a reality show, she embarks on her own to discover just what it was that her father meant her to find. What secret could be so powerful that he had to die before telling her?
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I cried with this one,
- By Angela on 08-16-23
By: Elizabeth Dutton
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The Fragile World
- A Novel
- By: Paula Treick DeBoard
- Narrated by: Jessica Almasy, Will Damron
- Length: 11 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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The Kaufmans have always considered themselves a normal, happy family. Curtis is a physics teacher at a local high school. His wife, Kathleen, restores furniture for upscale boutiques. Daniel is away at college on a prestigious music scholarship, and 12-year-old Olivia is a happy-go-lucky kid whose biggest concern is passing her next math test. And then comes the middle-of-the-night phone call that changes everything.
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Inaccurate
- By CCB on 03-10-15
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The Miseducation of Cameron Post
- By: Emily M. Danforth
- Narrated by: Beth Laufer
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Cameron Post feels a mix of guilt and relief when her parents die in a car accident. Their deaths mean they will never learn the truth she eventually comes to - that she's gay. Orphaned, Cameron comes to live with her old-fashioned grandmother and ultraconservative aunt Ruth. When she’s eventually outed, her aunt sends her to God’s Promise, a religious conversion camp that is supposed to “cure” her homosexuality. At the camp, Cameron comes face to face with the cost of denying her true identity.
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A very worthwhile Read!
- By TENA on 11-02-14
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An Abundance of Katherines
- By: John Green
- Narrated by: Jeff Woodman
- Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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When it comes to relationships, Colin Singleton’s type is girls named Katherine. And when it comes to girls named Katherine, Colin is always getting dumped. Nineteen times, to be exact. On a road trip miles from home, this anagram-happy, washed-up child prodigy has $10,000 in his pocket, a bloodthirsty feral hog on his trail, and an overweight, Judge Judy-loving best friend riding shotgun - but no Katherines.
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struggled to finish listening
- By Daniel on 03-11-20
By: John Green
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The Opposite of Loneliness
- Essays and Stories
- By: Marina Keegan
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 5 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Marina Keegan's star was on the rise when she graduated magna cum laude from Yale in May 2012. She had a play that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at the New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car crash. Even though she was just 22 when she died, Marina left behind a rich, expansive trove of prose that, like her title essay, captures the hope, uncertainty, and possibility of her generation.
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Probably buy the book too.
- By Soupergirl on 09-14-15
By: Marina Keegan
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Kissing Games of the World
- By: Sandi Kahn Shelton
- Narrated by: Myra Platt
- Length: 13 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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What if the one person you can't bear to be with is also the one person you can't bear to be without? Jamie McClintock is a free-spirited artist and single mother who has at last found peace and freedom sharing a farmhouse with an elderly man and his young grandson. But when the old man dies suddenly her idyllic country life comes to a halt as the old man's estranged son, Nate, returns to claim the house and his child.
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Great Writer, Great Narrator ! Loved it!
- By Ms. Critic on 05-30-09
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Looking for Alaska
- By: John Green
- Narrated by: Wil Wheaton
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Miles Halter is fascinated by famous last words - and tired of his safe life at home. He leaves for boarding school to seek what the dying poet François Rabelais called the “Great Perhaps”. Much awaits Miles at Culver Creek, including Alaska Young, who will pull Miles into her labyrinth and catapult him into the Great Perhaps.
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I am concussed dot-dot-dot
- By Bren McKenna on 10-01-19
By: John Green
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Dear Zoe
- A Novel
- By: Philip Beard
- Narrated by: Cassandra Morris
- Length: 4 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Beard's stunning debut is an epistolary novel written from 15-year-old Tess DeNunzio to her little sister Zoe. After Zoe's accidental death on September 11, 2001, a day so many others died, Tess' family is numbed by their personal tragedy. Already acutely aware of her odd place in a home where her mother and stepfather now have children of their own, Tess begins her letter as a means of figuring out her own life, from her two-hour-a-day hair and makeup ritual to her complicity in Zoe's death.
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keeps you listening.
- By nas on 10-18-09
By: Philip Beard
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"There", says Alice Hayward to Reverend Stephen Drew, just after her baptism, and just before going home to the husband who will kill her that evening and then shoot himself. Drew, tortured by the cryptic finality of that short utterance, feels his faith in God slipping away and is saved from despair only by a meeting with Heather Laurent, the author of wildly successful, inspirational books about...angels. Heather survived a childhood that culminated in her own parents' murder-suicide, so she identifies deeply with Alice’s daughter, Katie.
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In January 1945, in the waning months of World War II, a small group of people begin the longest journey of their lives: An attempt to cross the remnants of the Third Reich, from Warsaw to the Rhine if necessary, to reach the British and American lines. As they work their way west, they encounter a countryside ravaged by war. Their flight will test both Anna’s and Callum’s love, as well as their friendship with Manfred - assuming any of them even survive.
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Disappointed.
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When Kristin Chapman agrees to let her husband, Richard, host his brother's bachelor party, she expects a certain amount of debauchery. She brings their young daughter to Manhattan for the evening, leaving her Westchester home to the men and their hired entertainment. What she does not expect is this: bacchanalian drunkenness, her husband sharing a dangerously intimate moment in the guest room, and two women stabbing and killing their Russian bodyguards before driving off into the night.
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Blah, Blah, Blah
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Lianna Ahlberg is 17 when a thunderstorm snaps a power line to the earth, electrifying the ground, the rain spreading the current like wildfire across the wet grass. Two horses are killed in the nearby field, unnerving the neighbors, upsetting the peculiar boy who has just moved in, and filling Lianna with a deep and abiding sense of dread. This is not the first unusual thing to happen that summer - a summer when Lianna's mother begins to sleepwalk in the smallest hours of morning - and it will not be the last.
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Terrible narration....
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When Elizabeth Endicott arrives in Syria, she has a diploma from Mount Holyoke College, a crash course in nursing, and only the most basic grasp of the Armenian language. The First World War is spreading across Europe, and she has volunteered on behalf of the Boston-based Friends of Armenia to deliver food and medical aid to refugees of the Armenian genocide. There, Elizabeth becomes friendly with Armen, a young Armenian engineer who has already lost his wife and infant daughter. When Armen leaves Aleppo to join the British Army in Egypt, he begins to write Elizabeth letters....
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Bohjalian is Better Than This...
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Patience Avery is a dowser—a "water witch". Her natural gifts enable her to locate lost items, missing people, and aquifers deep within the earth. This last skill is more in demand than ever, as her home state of Vermont is in the grip of the worst drought in years. Patience knows better than most that this crisis is only the start: a sign of worse things to come.
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decent listen
- By Taintedrose76 on 01-18-23
By: Chris Bohjalian
What listeners say about Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Ray Stewart
- 08-27-14
Man writes as teenage girl.
How can an "older" man write like a teenage girl? Chris Bohjalian did a fantastic job of doing just that. I picked out this book because I have read many other books by Chris Bohjalian and have liked every one of them. This one was quite different from his other books and I wasn't sure I would like it in the beginning when it was in the voice of a teenage girl, with teen language. The character development was superb and heart-wrenching. Interesting that Bohjalian's daughter is the narrator for this audio-book.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Benjamin Button
- 08-06-18
Captivating and beautiful
Chris Bohjahlian never disappoints with his novels and this one is no different. This one has left me with a book hangover worrying about the main character ever since it ended.
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- Nancy D
- 11-07-23
Loved It So Much, Read It Twice
I loved everything about this book. The writing is wonderful, and the narrator is perfect for this story. The story was horrifying in so many ways, but it was full of love and hope and humor. The narrator can sing, too! I laughed out loud when she sang an Emily Dickinson poem to the Gilligan's Island theme tune. Chris and Grace, you must be very proud of each other!
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- Nikki
- 10-07-15
Great narration and curious plot.
This audiobook is well written and an intriguing story but super sad. No happy endings. Barely a ray of sunshine poking through anywhere. Bring your box of Kleenex.
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- Mary C. Mouwdy
- 06-15-24
Heartbreakingly Real
I could never (really) even begin to imagine what surviving on the streets would be like for a runaway or homeless teen, but Chris Bohjalian has done it, and has opened my eyes and broken my heart in the telling. But the story is about so much more than that: about families and adolescent/teen rebellion, about the difficulties of being a child who refuses to fit into other's ideas of what she should be, about losing friends and making new ones, and about the need to be needed, which is part of each of us. This novel will stay with me and haunt me for a long time, and I suspect I will be revisiting it more than once.
I was also impressed by the skill with which it was read, not just the expression of Emily's thoughts and feelings, but with the diction, as well! I am a little hard of hearing, and it is such a pleasure to hear such clear and measured enunciation! I wasn't fond of hearing all the profanity and rough language, but it made the story seem even more gritty and real, so I believe it was necessary.
Thank you for a most absorbing read!
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- Vinny Black
- 08-10-14
An page turner in the first degree!
What did you love best about Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands?
The character who narrates the novel, Emily, is funny and ironic and quirky. I wish more young people were this unique and insightful.
What did you like best about this story?
Emily Shepard and her take on her favorite poet Emily Dickenson. .And I love disaster scenarios.
Which character – as performed by Grace Blewer – was your favorite?
Emily Shepard!
Who was the most memorable character of Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands and why?
Emily will stay with me a long, long time.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Leah
- 06-21-16
Is best book to date
About 20 years ago, I took two of Chris's classes at Trinity College. Over the years, I have followed his writing. I have enjoyed his previous novels, but this one will stick with me for the rest of my life. The depiction of Emily Shepard was stunning, emotionally raw, and, in many ways, uplifting. Despite the trauma she indoors, her resiliency is breathtaking. On a sidenote, I remember Chris talking about his very small child named Gracie when I had him as a professor. So, I loved hearing her as the near raider of this book. Thank you Chris for all you do. Keep up the wonderful work! And Grace, keep narrating. You are a pro!
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1 person found this helpful
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- C Enyart-Elfers
- 12-14-14
great choice for YA & adult book clubs...
Where does Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
Captivating! I listened over a period of time as I was recuperating from a surgery.
What did you like best about this story?
Living near a nuclear plant, many of the emotions & concerns about an explosion have crossed my mind. It made me wonder if a similar storyline would follow in our area.
What about Grace Blewer’s performance did you like?
So convincing that she moves through the emotions of loss & trying to rationalize how she feels people must see her... as the daughter of the operator who contributed to the plant malfunction!
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
When she returned to her home after the plant explosion... and begin to plan her new life.
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- Kindle Customer
- 12-26-17
Wow
Great book - listened to it with my teenage daughter. Some very difficult moments but good talking points.
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- Cecilia
- 09-02-14
Overall a good book, but poorly narrated
I was very caught up by the story of this young girl. However, his daughter, Grace's, narration was flat and uninflected, clearly showed a lack of ability to read with character. A professional narrator or actor would have made the story even more riveting.
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5 people found this helpful