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Monkey Boy
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 12 hrs and 12 mins
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Publisher's summary
Our narrator, Francisco Goldberg, has been living and working in Mexico City as a journalist for over a decade, but has recently returned to New York City in hopes of "going home again". It's been five years since the end of his last relationship, and he is falling in love again. Soon, he is beckoned back to Boston by the high school girlfriend who was witness to his greatest youthful humiliations, and his mother, Yolanda, around whom his story orbits like a dark star. Backdropping this five-day trip to his childhood home is the specter of Frank's recently deceased father, Bert, an immigrant from Ukraine, volcanically tempered, pathologically abusive, yet also, at times infuriatingly endearing; as well as the high school bullies who gave him the moniker "monkey boy" and his estranged, larger-than-life sister, Lexi.
Told in an open, irresistibly funny, and passionate voice, this extraordinary portrait of growing up outside the dominant culture unearths the hidden cruelties in a predominantly white, working-class Boston suburb where Francisco - aka Paco, aka Frankie Gee - came of age. A crowning achievement from one of the most important American voices in the last 40 years.
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- Length: 13 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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My Life as a Rat follows Violet Rue Kerrigan, a young woman who looks back upon her life in exile from her family following her testimony, at age 12, concerning what she knew to be the racist murder of an African American boy by her older brothers. In a succession of vividly recalled episodes, Violet contemplates the circumstances of her life as the initially beloved youngest child of seven Kerrigan children who inadvertently “informs” on her brothers, setting into motion their arrests and convictions and her own long estrangement.
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Heavy Topics & Satisfying Story
- By Oscar on 06-30-19
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The Ungrateful Refugee
- What Immigrants Never Tell You
- By: Dina Nayeri
- Narrated by: Dina Nayeri
- Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Aged eight, Dina Nayeri fled Iran along with her mother and brother and lived in the crumbling shell of an Italian hotel-turned-refugee camp. Eventually, she was granted asylum in America. She settled in Oklahoma, then made her way to Princeton University. In this book, Nayeri weaves together her own vivid story with the stories of other refugees and asylum seekers in recent years, bringing us inside their daily lives and taking us through the different stages of their journeys, from escape to asylum to resettlement.
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Amazing story of resilience and compassion
- By PAH on 09-06-19
By: Dina Nayeri
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Say I'm Dead
- A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love
- By: E. Dolores Johnson
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Fearful of prison time - or lynching - for violating Indiana’s anti-miscegenation laws in the 1940s, E. Dolores Johnson's Black father and White mother fled Indianapolis to secretly marry in Buffalo. Her mother simply vanished, evading an FBI and police search that ended with the declaration to her family that she was the victim of foul play, either dead or sold into white slavery.
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Deeply meaningful important read
- By A.M.Rousseau on 12-21-21
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The Shadow Lines
- By: Amitav Ghosh
- Narrated by: Raj Varma
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Opening in Calcutta in the 1960s, Ghosh’s radiant second novel follows two families - one English, one Bengali - as their lives intertwine in tragic and comic ways. The narrator, Indian-born and English educated, traces events back and forth in time, through years of Bengali partition and violence, observing the ways in which political events invade private lives.
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Narrator Doesn't Know How to Pronounce
- By Amazon Customer on 08-27-11
By: Amitav Ghosh
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The Stuff that Never Happened
- A Novel
- By: Maddie Dawson
- Narrated by: Teri Clark Linden
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Annabelle McKay knows she shouldn’t have any complaints. She’s been in a stable marriage that’s lasted almost three decades and has provided her with two wonderful children and thousands of family dinners around a sturdy oak table. Other wives envy the fact that Grant is not the type of man who would ever cheat on her or leave her for a younger woman. The trouble is Annabelle isn’t sure she wants to be married to Grant anymore. The trouble is she’s still in love with someone else.
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Don’t pass this one up.
- By Lauren on 03-10-20
By: Maddie Dawson
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Fault Lines
- A Novel
- By: Emily Itami
- Narrated by: Lydia Wilson
- Length: 5 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Mizuki is a Japanese housewife. She has a hardworking husband, two adorable children, and a beautiful Tokyo apartment. It’s everything a woman could want, yet sometimes she wonders whether she would rather throw herself off the high-rise balcony than spend another evening not talking to her husband and hanging up laundry.
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Confused by the choice of narrator
- By Bri T. on 02-13-22
By: Emily Itami
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Clara Callan
- By: Richard B. Wright
- Narrated by: Anne Twomey, Joanna P. Adler
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Two sisters, small-town Ontario, 1934. Canadian author Richard Wright tells their story, from the ordinary to the extraoridinary with an eye for the commonplace and poignant sense of the larger undercurrents that change people's lives.
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charming intimate refreshing
- By L on 09-10-04
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Meh
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This is one convoluted storyline with dragging narration.
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it didn't have a resolution.
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Wish I liked this
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Wish there was a pronunciation coach
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In eight incantatory sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces the extraordinary lives of young Japanese brides, from their arduous journey by boat, where they exchange photographs of their husbands, imagining uncertain futures in an unknown land; to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives; to their backbreaking work picking fruit in the fields and scrubbing the floors of white women; to their struggles to master a new language and a new culture; to their experiences in childbirth, and then as mothers....
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Not at all interesting
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Slow torture written too hastily
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On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother of four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappears, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling.
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Painfully powerful Tale.
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The Nickel Boys (Winner 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)
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When Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. Elwood’s only salvation is his friendship with fellow “delinquent” Turner, which deepens despite Turner’s conviction that Elwood is hopelessly naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble.
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Who spoke for the black boys?
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When two young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to growing apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths an ancient mass grave—only to discover that the earth refuse to give up their secrets.
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An American Masterpiece
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The Overstory
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The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late 20th-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits 100 years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light.
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eye opening
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What listeners say about Monkey Boy
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Katherine fordney
- 08-01-22
Very engaging!
A memoir of a sad, interesting life. The story is very captivating and performance of the reader great!
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- Ted Henken
- 02-06-24
NYC to Boston (and everywhere else)
Goldman’s minute descriptions of thoughts, emotions, memories, and physical landscapes are entrancing. His evocation of his childhood and memories of war in Guatemala are powerful. His love for his mother and struggle to survive his father’s rage are moving. I also love that all this is told in a series of richly embroidered tangents framed within a solo road trip from nyc to Boston.
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- Amazon Customer
- 05-29-21
Anticlimactic at every turn
I initially heard an interview with the author for this book on NPR, at the time it sounded interesting. I suppose this is one of those rare instances the interviewer was obliged or even paid to give a good review. Afterward I purchased this book for a friend's birthday and decided to listen to it on Audible before gifting it, now all I want to do is throw the book away. Rarely do I experience such a waste of time in even the worst of books.
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5 people found this helpful