Finding Esme
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Narrated by:
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Cassandra Morris
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By:
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Suzanne Crowley
About this listen
Twelve-year-old Esme’s life changes when she discovers dinosaur bones on her family’s peach farm in Texas.
Fans of Wendy Maas and Lynda Mullaly Hunt will love this perfectly pitched story about friendship, family, and loss from Suzanne Crowley, the acclaimed author of The Very Ordered Existence of Merilee Marvelous.
After her grandfather died from a heart attack while driving his tractor on Solace Hill, 12-year-old Esme's been inextricably drawn to that spot, although her grandmother warns her to stay away. But when she follows her little brother, Bo, and her dog, Old Jack, up the hill while chasing fireflies, she makes an incredible discovery - dinosaur bones peeking out from underneath the abandoned tractor.
The bones must be a message from her grandfather, a connection from beyond the grave. But when word gets out that the farm is hiding something valuable, reporters, researchers, and neighbors arrive in droves. Esme struggles to understand who has her best interests at heart, especially as the memory of her grandfather begins to slip away.
Full of friendship and adventure, and featuring a palpable Texas setting, Finding Esme is a moving and heartfelt story about family, friendship, and learning to deal with loss.
From acclaimed author Suzanne Crowley, this engaging adventure set on a Texas peach farm is just right for fans of Rebecca Stead and Ann M. Martin.
©2018 Suzanne Crowley (P)2018 HarperCollins PublishersListeners also enjoyed...
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- By Christina on 11-11-04
By: Patricia Hickman
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Hour of the Bees
- By: Lindsay Eagar
- Narrated by: Almarie Guerra
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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While her friends are spending their summers having pool parties and sleepovers, twelve-year-old Carolina - Carol - is spending hers in the middle of the New Mexico desert, helping her parents move the grandfather she's never met into a home for people with dementia. At first, Carol avoids prickly Grandpa Serge.
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Love it!
- By Lucy Manetti on 04-10-17
By: Lindsay Eagar
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Bone Gap
- By: Laura Ruby
- Narrated by: Dan Bittner
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Bone Gap is the story of Roza, a beautiful girl who is taken from a quiet Midwestern town and imprisoned by a mysterious man, and Finn, the only witness, who cannot forgive himself for being unable to identify her kidnapper. As we follow them through their melancholy pasts, their terrifying presents, and their uncertain futures, acclaimed author Laura Ruby weaves a heartbreaking tale of love and loss, magic and mystery, regret and forgiveness.
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Beauty is In the Eye of the Beholder
- By FanB14 on 11-23-15
By: Laura Ruby
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Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance
- A Novel
- By: Ruth Emmie Lang
- Narrated by: Piper Goodeve, Peter Berkrot, Cassandra Campbell, and others
- Length: 10 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Stopping a tornado was the first of many strange events that seem to follow Weylyn from town to town, although he doesn't like to take credit. As amazing as these powers may appear, they tend to manifest themselves at inopportune times and places. From freak storms to trees that appear to grow over night, Weylyn's unique abilities are a curiosity at best and at worst, a danger to himself and the woman he loves. But Mary doesn't care.
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An Accidental Wonder!
- By Brandy Pendergrass on 02-16-18
By: Ruth Emmie Lang
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Sugar
- By: Bernice L. McFadden
- Narrated by: Myra Lucretia Taylor
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Sugar arrives in the small town of Bigelow, Arkansas, like an ominous storm. She saunters down the street in a blonde wig and spiked heels, cigarette dangling between red-painted lips. Without even speaking to her, the women in town hate her. But when she moves in next door to Pearl, a woman who tragically lost her daughter 15 years earlier, the two women bond over tragic pasts.
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Wow wow wow
- By brenda transon on 08-27-19
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Rush Home Road
- By: Lori Lansens
- Narrated by: Ruby Dee
- Length: 6 hrs and 27 mins
- Abridged
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When a 70-year-old woman finds a five-year-old girl abandoned on her doorstep, she is thrust into a sorrowful past that can only be conquered with the help of the girl who opened her memory - the very girl she is trying to save. This first novel, according to author Jacquelyn Mitchard, is one of "exquisite power, honesty, and conviction...quite nearly without flaws."
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filthy language and violent content
- By Anna on 12-16-11
By: Lori Lansens
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The Girl in the Locked Room
- A Ghost Story
- By: Mary Downing Hahn
- Narrated by: Rachel Dulude
- Length: 3 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Jules' family moves into an old abandoned house. Her parents love it, but she's frightened and feels a sense of foreboding. When she sees a pale face in an upstairs window, she can't stop wondering about the eerie presence on the top floor - in a room with a locked door. Her fear replaced by fascination, Jules becomes determined to make contact with the mysterious figure and to unlock the door. Past and present intersect as she and her ghostly friend discover the fate of the family who lived in the house all those many years ago.
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Excellent Narrator!
- By Seth Adam Smith on 05-02-20
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Each Little Bird That Sings
- By: Deborah Wiles
- Narrated by: Kim Mai Guest
- Length: 5 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Ten-year-old Comfort Snowberger has attended 247 funerals. But that's not surprising, considering that her family runs the town funeral home. And even though Great-uncle Edisto keeled over with a heart attack and Great-great-aunt Florentine dropped dead, just like that, six months later, Comfort knows how to deal with loss, or so she thinks.
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Great book
- By Amazon Customer on 08-17-20
By: Deborah Wiles
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Midnight at the Electric
- By: Jodi Lynn Anderson
- Narrated by: Jorjeana Marie, Bailey Carr, Fiona Hardingham
- Length: 6 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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2065: Adri has been handpicked to live on Mars. But weeks before launch, she discovers the journal of a girl who lived in her house more than a hundred years ago and is immediately drawn into the mystery surrounding her fate. 1934: Amid the fear and uncertainty of the Dust Bowl, Catherine’s family’s situation is growing dire. She must find the courage to sacrifice everything she loves in order to save the one person she loves most.
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Beautiful, Heart-wrenching, and Unbelievably Engaging
- By Brad&Britney on 01-10-18
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Gathering of Waters
- By: Bernice L. McFadden
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 6 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Gathering of Waters is a deeply engrossing tale narrated by the town of Money, Mississippi - a site both significant and infamous in our collective story as a nation. Money is personified in this haunting story, which chronicles its troubled history following the arrival of the Hilson and Bryant families. Tass Hilson and Emmett Till were young and in love when Emmett was brutally murdered in 1955. Anxious to escape the town, Tass marries Maximillian May and relocates to Detroit
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Loved it!!
- By Naima on 07-26-16
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Other Voices, Other Rooms
- By: Truman Capote
- Narrated by: Cody Roberts
- Length: 6 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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At the age of 12, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at the decaying mansion in Skully's Landing, his father is nowhere in sight. What he finds instead is a sullen stepmother who delights in killing birds; an uncle with the face - and heart - of a debauched child; and a fearsome little girl named Idabel who may offer him the closest thing he has ever known to love.
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Capote’s coming of age story
- By Daniel Diffin on 11-08-23
By: Truman Capote
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Promise
- A Novel
- By: Minrose Gwin
- Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
- Length: 12 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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In the aftermath of a devastating tornado that rips through the town of Tupelo, Mississippi, at the height of the Great Depression, two women worlds apart - one Black, one White; one a great-grandmother, the other a teenager - fight for their families' survival in this lyrical and powerful novel.
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Mostly Disappointing
- By Anjoli on 06-15-19
By: Minrose Gwin
What listeners say about Finding Esme
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Hall Ways
- 02-12-20
Among the best middle grade books I have read
Audio Book Review: FINDING ESME, though geared for a middle grade audience (and appropriately so), has MUCH to love for all ages because of the timeless themes and struggles that define what it is to be human. Those elements, coupled with characters who come from basically the same molds of people found everywhere, in every small town, give the book universal appeal. FINDING ESME is a lot of things including a subtle mystery but also an exploration of grief, poverty, disappointment, and identity. It’s a coming-of-age story that includes crotchety old women and nosy neighbors, good and not-so-good people with good and not-so-good intentions, and those who are abused, abandoned, and avoided. And dinosaurs! And ghosts…maybe.
“My momma used to say we look back on our lives when we’re afraid of what’s in front of us.”
FINDING ESME is a book that you want to quote line after line; it’s lyrical and beautiful from the very beginning, and as much as I adored the audio version, I am going to have to buy the print version as well because there are passages I want to revisit and absorb. You just can’t do that with audio.
Author Suzanne Crowley’s characterization is outstanding. Her sketches of folks are so descriptive that these people feel like neighbors or family or the friends of friends that we all hear about. It’s the small details that Crowley includes that flesh-out and bring people to vivid life. From the Johnson’s Baby Powder scent that wafts around one person, to the cigarettes always present like an appendage on another, to how Bee “always had something on her that wasn’t supposed to be there,” like a piece of peach on her cheek, readers not only see the people in Esme’s life, we smell them. We experience them.
“My, she’d have to stand on her toes to look a rattler in her eyes. When’s she gonna grow up?”
And there is Esme, who makes you want to reach into the story, yank her out, and hug on her until all her pain and worry and grief wash away. Esme reminds us of how grief can consume a person and of how desperately the grieving hang on to memories of loved ones lost – even when the loss isn’t due to death but due to the physical and emotional absence of them. The defense systems Esme creates to protect herself and deal with it all are both amazing and heartbreaking, but she is a resilient little thing who deflects the verbal criticisms and the pain of being ignored and shut out. She calls her mother, grandmother, and father by their first names; but her grandfather is Paps; there is a lot of untold meaning there.
An interesting aspect of FINDING ESME is that the timeframe is a little wiggly but really works perfectly. (I don’t think this is because I read with my ears, but it’s possible.) The time period within which FINDING ESME takes place seems like it is whatever you want it to be. There are references to things that you don’t find much anymore such as landlines (party lines, no less!) and people mailing real postcards. But there are a few more modern references, which remind you that sometimes time stands still and in a time warp in small towns.
There is a mostly subtle thread of magical realism running through the book, but it feels like something many readers have experienced, whether we buy into it or not. There is also a touch of the paranormal, and while some of it feels realistic, there is one integral part of the story that I felt needed more explanation to strengthen the story. But just like Esme is with most questions in her own life, readers are left to draw their own conclusions.
ABOUT THE NARRATION: I wasn’t sure initially about narrator Cassandra Morris’s voice; it is high-pitched and there is a serious Texas twang to it. My uncertainty lasted about three minutes before I realized that Morris’s performance is spot-on perfection for the voice of Esme. Childlike but with the old soul that comes through from Crowley’s writing of Esme, Morris owned it, and I never again thought about it. I listened at regular speed – the exception, not the rule for me – and the pacing was perfect. From a technical standpoint, it was glitch-free and a real pleasure to listen to the story without distractions.
FINDING ESME is among my favorite middle grade books I have read, and even several weeks after finishing it, it sticks with me. I find myself thinking about Esme and if life is better now that she’s found Louella Goodbones, found some closure, and more than anything else, found herself. I highly recommend FINDING ESME for ages 10 and up (some of it could be a little too creepy and confusing for younger audiences).
Thank you to the Lone Star Book Blog Tours and the author for providing me audio CDs in exchange for my honest opinion – the only kind I give.
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