Saving the World
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Narrated by:
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Blanca Camacho
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By:
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Julia Alvarez
About this listen
A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award with In the Time of Butterflies, author Julia Alvarez is a beloved voice in modern fiction and poetry. In Saving the World, she weaves the stories of two courageous women—separated by two centuries—into a breathtaking novel of love and idealism in an increasingly troubled world.
A best-selling, Latin-American author living in Vermont, Alma stays behind when her husband travels to the Dominican Republic to help fight AIDS. She needs the time to work on her latest book, but she has terrible writer’s block. Soon, her focus is diverted to an entirely new story, that of the early 19th-century anti-smallpox expedition of Dr. Francisco Balmis. Accompanying Dr. Balmis was Doña Isabel, who cared for the orphan boys serving as living carriers of the smallpox vaccine. It is the narrative of the courageous Doña Isabel that provides hope and inspiration when Alma’s husband is taken captive. Mesmerizing and poetic, Saving the World is a visionary tale that raises profound questions about the world we live in—and whether or not it is beyond redemption.
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East London, 1888 - a city apart. A place of shadow and light where thieves, whores, and dreamers mingle, where children play in the cobbled streets by day and a killer stalks at night, where bright hopes meet the darkest truths. Here, by the whispering waters of the Thames, Fiona Finnegan, a worker in a tea factory, hopes to own a shop one day, together with her lifelong love, Joe Bristow, a costermonger's son. With nothing but their faith in each other to spur them on, Fiona and Joe struggle, save, and sacrifice to achieve their dreams.
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Wow. Wow wow wow!
- By I like to shop on 04-26-16
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Galilee
- By: Clive Barker
- Narrated by: Paul Hecht
- Length: 23 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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The Barbarossa family’s roots are far more ancient and ethereal, but they are bound to the Gearys by a shared history of murder, insanity, and adultery. When Rachel Geary and Galilee, the seductive prince of the Barbarossa clan, fall in love, they unleash powerful enmities that could destroy both dynasties. Shorter and more conventional than some of Barker’s other work, this novel is especially rich with complex, passionate, three-dimensional characters, lush settings, and elegant language.
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An Audiophile's Dream
- By Joseph on 09-01-11
By: Clive Barker
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The Daughters of Mars
- By: Tom Keneally
- Narrated by: Jane Nolan
- Length: 18 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Naomi and Sally Durance are daughters of a dairy farmer from the Macleay Valley. Bound together in complicity by what they consider a crime, when the Great War begins in 1914 they hope to submerge their guilt by leaving for Europe to nurse the tides of young wounded. They head for the Dardanelles on the hospital ship Archimedes. Their education in medicine, valour, and human degradation continues on the Greek island of Lemnos, then on the Western Front. Here, new outrages - gas, shell-shock - present themselves.
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Interesting WWI novel with an Australian bent
- By Sarah Gamp on 03-09-13
By: Tom Keneally
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The Patriots
- A Novel
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- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren, George Guidall
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Florence Fein grows up in Brooklyn in the 1930s, in a family that is gaining a foothold in the middle class. At City College she becomes engaged politically with the left-leaning student groups, and eventually, in the midst of the Depression, she takes a job with a trade organization that has a position for her in Moscow. There, she falls in love with another expatriate American and has a son. Soon after, Florence is sent to a work camp and her son to an orphanage.
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Point of View of characters, past and present collide
- By Angela Adams on 01-29-19
By: Sana Krasikov
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City of Tranquil Light
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- By: Bo Caldwell
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
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Will Kiehn is seemingly destined for life as a humble farmer in the Midwest when, having felt a call from God, he travels to the vast North China Plain in the early twentieth century. There he is surprised by love and weds a strong and determined fellow missionary, Katherine. They soon find themselves witnesses to the crumbling of a more than two-thousand-year-old dynasty that plunges the country into decades of civil war.
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What We're Here For
- By Annette on 10-14-10
By: Bo Caldwell
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The Woman at the Light
- A Novel
- By: Joanna Brady
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 10 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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One afternoon in 1839, Emily Lowry’s husband vanishes from Wreckers’ Cay, an isolated island off the coast of Key West where he tends the lighthouse. As days stretch into months, Emily has no choice but to take charge of Wreckers’ Cay and her husband’s duties tending the light to support her three children - and a fourth on the way. Unexpected help arrives when a runaway slave named Andrew washes up on their beach. At first, Emily is intensely wary of this strange, charming man, whose very presence there is highly illegal. But Andrew proves himself an enormous help and soon wins the hearts of the Lowry family.
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Good Listen
- By Kathleen Herbert on 08-06-12
By: Joanna Brady
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Wedding Ring
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- Narrated by: Isabel Keating
- Length: 15 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Needing time to contemplate her troubled marriage, Tessa MacRae agrees to spend the summer helping her mother and grandmother clean out the family home in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. But the three women have never been close.
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Loved it All Over Again
- By Kathryn @theBookDate on 03-26-16
By: Emilie Richards
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The Stranger House
- By: Reginald Hill
- Narrated by: Gordon Griffin
- Length: 16 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
For years, the Stranger House has stood in the village of Illthwaite, offering refuge to travellers. People like Sam, a brilliant young mathematician, who believes that anything that can't be explained by maths isn't worth explaining. And Miguel, a historian running from a priests' seminary, who sees ghosts. Sam is an experienced young woman, Miguel a 26-year-old virgin.
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an OK read
- By Jen Terry on 01-18-08
By: Reginald Hill
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The Silence of Ghosts
- A Novel
- By: Jonathan Aycliffe
- Narrated by: Roger Clark
- Length: 7 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Dominic Lancaster hoped to prove himself to his family by excelling in the Navy during World War II. Instead he is wounded while serving as a gunner, and loses his leg. Still recovering from his wounds and the trauma of his amputation when the Blitz begins, Dominic finds himself shuffled off to the countryside by his family, along with his partially deaf sister, Octavia.
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Spooky story. All it lacks is the campfire.
- By DarylP on 10-09-15
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The Immortal Prince
- Tide Lords, Book 1
- By: Jennifer Fallon
- Narrated by: John Telfer
- Length: 19 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
He's insisting he's a Tide Lord and he's begging us to try again...to kill him, that is. When a routine hanging goes wrong, the survivor announces he is Cayal the immortal Prince, a Tide Lord. However, the only known record of the immortal beings of Amyrantha is the Tide Lord Tarot...and everyone knows it is only a parlour-game, an amusement. Arkady Desean, an expert on the legends of the Crasii - a part-animal, part-human race - is sent to interrogate Cayal.
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really hard to listen to
- By Scott Oeskovic on 02-09-18
By: Jennifer Fallon
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First Lessons
- Medieval Tale 1
- By: Lina J. Potter
- Narrated by: Tiffany Morgan
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
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Being a genius Medical school graduate and a sporty and active girl, Aliya dies suddenly in a car accident... only to find herself reborn in a completely different body in the middle of a half-ruined castle during Medieval times. While confused and dismayed, Aliya realizes she has been given a second chance in life - so she rolls up her sleeves and gets to work on restoring the castle and her new life.
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Reads like a high school project
- By P on 07-04-20
By: Lina J. Potter
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What listeners say about Saving the World
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Kenneth Powell
- 05-06-24
Split narrative never comes together -poor audio
This my 2nd Alvarez novel - after discovered her newest 'The Cemetery of Untold Stories' to be brilliant (in both the writing and the audiobook narration).
This is one of Alvarez's earlier works, and I noted in advance that reviews, both here on Audible and on Goodreads, were less than glowing. I was more than willing to contradict that negativity, but sadly I don't think I honestly can.
The novel is one with the (relatively common of late) structure of a 'novel within a novel.' The primary story of a writer's blocked popular novelist is interspersed with that character's 'reading' of a 'true' story of a woman accompanying a long ship's voyage that attempts to combat the smallpox epidemic of the late 1800s. Separately, but stories have moments of strength and perhaps might have worked better as individual novels. The alternating of storylines, at times, gets in the way of either really building the necessary momentum to grip one's attention and compassion for their narrators. Additionally, about half-way through the novel, the tone seems to change. The first half is well-written and very much in the tone of what I experienced from Alvarez'a other work. The rest seemed to lack that polish, as storylines became somewhat rushed, adverbs began running quite wild, and the overall novel suffered for it (particularly the storyline in the present, following the novelist, Alma).
And now for the strange part of listening to this work.
Blanca Camacho has a wonderful voice, does a respectable job separating the characters for the listener's ears, and is 1000% credible in her diction and pronunciation of both English and Spanish. What is extremely problematic, however, is something that perhaps is more the fault of the production that it is that of the narrator. From the very beginning, sounds from Camacho's mouth/throat are easily heard. It is not unlike the unpleasant experience of listening to someone eat with their mouth open. Her every swallow, licking of lips, etc., is clear and distasteful to the ear. Even more unusual, as I"ve listened to over 400 books on audible, was hearing the reader take a drink of water in the middle of reading.
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- IYOUCHBI
- 08-21-16
Worst Book of all Time
What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?
Nothing in the known universe
Would you ever listen to anything by Julia Alvarez again?
I would rather fall into the sun that listen to her novels again
Would you be willing to try another one of Blanca Camacho’s performances?
HAHAHAHA you'r joking right?
You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?
Ya it ended.
Any additional comments?
Never, EVER read this garbage
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