Ordinary Love and Good Will
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Narrated by:
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LJ Ganser
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Suzanne Toren
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By:
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Jane Smiley
About this listen
From Jane Smiley, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Thousand Acres: a pair of novellas chronicling difficult choices that reshape the dynamics of two very different families.
In Ordinary Love, Smiley focuses on a woman's infidelity and the lasting, indelible effects it leaves on her children long after her departure. Good Will describes a father who realizes how his son has been affected by his decision to lead a counterculture life and move his family to a farm. As both stories unfold, Smiley gracefully raises the questions that confront all families with the characteristic style and insight that has marked all of her work.
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Award-winning poet Marisa de los Santos crafts an irresistibly touching debut novel. Love Walked In is a contemporary tale, steeped in nostalgic, cinematic charm, of love in all its forms. Unapologetically idealistic about love, Cornelia Brown appears to catch the break of a lifetime when the dashing Martin Grace, her own personal Cary Grant, comes strolling into her life. But it is Martin's connection to 11-year-old Clare Hobbes that touches Cornelia's heart in ways she never imagined.
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Dreadful audio quality
- By Marenghi on 09-16-11
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The Choice
- Lancaster County Secrets, Book 1
- By: Suzanne Woods Fisher
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 10 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Lancaster County has always been her home - but where does her heart belong? One moment Carrie Weaver was looking forward to running away with Lancaster Barnstormers pitcher Solomon Riehl - plans that included leaving the Amish community where they grew up. But the next moment she was staring into a future as broken as her heart....
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Literary Amish Story
- By Carrie Fancett Pagels on 11-29-11
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The Portable Veblen
- By: Elizabeth Mckenzie
- Narrated by: Julia Gibson
- Length: 12 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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An exuberant, one-of-a-kind novel about love and family, war and nature, new money and old values by a brilliant New Yorker contributor. The Portable Veblen is a dazzlingly original novel that's as big-hearted as it is laugh-out-loud funny. Set in and around Palo Alto amid the culture clash of new money and old (antiestablishment) values, and with the specter of our current wars looming across its words, The Portable Veblen is an unforgettable look at the way we live now.
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Not what it was cracked up to be
- By Linda on 02-03-16
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The Lost Girls
- A Novel
- By: Heather Young
- Narrated by: Alice Rosengard, Laurel Schroeder
- Length: 12 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1935, six-year-old Emily Evans vanishes from her family's vacation home on a remote Minnesota lake. Her disappearance destroys the family - her father commits suicide, and her mother and two older sisters spend the rest of their lives at the lake house, keeping a decades-long vigil for the lost child. Sixty years later, Lucy, the quiet and watchful middle sister, lives in the lake house alone. Before her death, she writes the story of that devastating summer in a notebook that she leaves, along with the house, to the only person who might care: her grandniece, Justine.
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Engaging story spanning three generations.
- By LilMissMolly on 09-23-16
By: Heather Young
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Prodigal Summer
- By: Barbara Kingsolver
- Narrated by: Barbara Kingsolver
- Length: 15 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives in southern Appalachia. At the heart of these intertwined narratives is a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches them from an isolated mountain cabin where she is caught off-guard by Eddie Bondo, a young hunter who comes to invade her most private spaces and her solitary life.
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Amazing!
- By Lily on 10-12-08
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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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To See the Moon Again
- By: Jamie Langston Turner
- Narrated by: Eva Kaminsky
- Length: 13 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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The first step to letting go of the past is forgiving it …Every day of her life Julia Rich lives with the memory of a horrible accident she caused long ago. In the years since, she has tried to hide her guilt in the quiet routine of teaching at a small South Carolina college, avoiding close relationships with family and would-be friends. But one day a phone call from Carmen, a niece she has never met, disrupts her carefully controlled world.
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Beautiful Story of Forgiveness and Selfless Love
- By sharon on 09-20-14
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Too Close to the Falls
- A Memoir
- By: Catherine Gildiner
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Welcome to the childhood of Catherine McClure Gildiner. It is the middle of the 1950s in Lewiston, New York, a small and sleepy American town very near Niagara Falls. No one is divorced. Mothers wear high heels to the beauty salon and children pop Pez candy and swing from vines over a local gorge. But at the tender age of four, it becomes clear to her Cathy's parents that their rambunctious daughter is no ordinary child and they soon put her "to work" at her father's pharmacy.
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Brilliant and funny and touching.
- By Kindle Customer on 11-07-19
What listeners say about Ordinary Love and Good Will
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- A. Matheny
- 03-23-22
Interesting tone in both stories, but uneven results
You realize how important the reader is to the success of a story on Audible. The reader of first story here seemed to catch the right tone of Smiley’s prose and delivered its message just right, even though the message was rather diffused and confused (as life is sometimes).
The reader of the second story had a very assertive tone that, to me, didn’t really reflect the proper tone, unless Smiley’s intent was to make the narrator a dominating know-it-all whose arrogance led to ruining his family’s country life. A different reader might had adopted a less aggressive, more reflective tone and made the story less dark and more nuanced, but not less sad in outcome. Had I read the book rather than listened, I would have enjoyed the second story a lot, but I ended up just not liking the guy at all and feeling sorry for his wife and son.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Sharlotte
- 01-29-21
Superb Novellas
These were two very different family stories - - one from the perspective of a woman, one from a man. Smiley is adept at developing characters that come into focus and yet the reader must pay attention to fully appreciate the subtleties of her understanding of the characters and recognize her genius at crafting fiction.
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4 people found this helpful
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- patrice mastrianni
- 09-20-21
Not her best work
I really enjoyed this author’s book Horse Heaven but these two novellas didn’t thrill me. The first Ordinary Love was the better of the two. Good Will was a tale of a live-off-the-land family with a bizarre son who does violent acts against a classmate. The parents do not at all seem surprised by his behavior or take action to cure him. I felt the parents were in denial and weird.
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1 person found this helpful
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- rmscalia
- 12-11-23
Enjoyed these novellas!
They both definitely sucked me in. I think I like the second one more than the first one; definitely time well spent.
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- Amazon Customer
- 06-23-21
boring way too much
Although the author used good writing technique I feel the writer over exaggerated too many details that took away and distracted from the story plot. Then again the actual plot was very hard to grasp and follow along with and I easily got distracted from it. Did not catch my attention at all unfortunately.
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1 person found this helpful