The Astor Orphan
A Memoir
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Narrated by:
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Tavia Gilbert
About this listen
Alexandra Aldrich, a direct descendant of the famous Astor dynasty, grew up in the servants' quarters of Rokeby, the 43-room Hudson Valley mansion built by her ancestors. Her childhood was one of bohemian neglect and real privation. But it was fairly stable until the summer of her tenth year, when her father took up with an alluring interloper, Giselle.
Alexandra idolized her father, Rokeby's charismatic lord of misrule, who had attended elite private schools as a child but inherited only landed property, not money. To him, she says, "poverty was amusing, a delightful challenge." All of the family's resources - emotional and financial - went to the maintenance of the Astor house and legacy. If the family had sold the house and its 450 acres, they all would have been able to live comfortably. Instead, Alexandra and her parents lived precariously in the grand house, scavenging for the next meal.
Her mother, an icy Polish artist, disguised her maternal indifference by extolling the virtues of independence. Relatives preyed on Alexandra's low status in the household. Once her father got involved with Giselle, Alexandra's only stalwart was her affectionate grandmother (whose great-great-grandfather, Nicholas Fish, was a close friend of Alexander Hamilton's and an executor of his estate). Grandma Claire held Alexandra's life together with family dinner parties, rides to violin lessons, and snacks after school. But as she grew progressively more debilitated by alcohol, she soon became too frail to provide a safe haven for her granddaughter.
Determined to impose order on her anarchic world and prove her worth, Alexandra awoke promptly at six-thirty each morning, adhering to a strict personal regimen of exercise, grooming, and intensive violin practice. With money borrowed from the owner of the local gas station, she did the grocery shopping, occasionally setting aside four dollars to buy herself clean white socks. The betrayal of her father's flagrant affair, however, ignited a series of familial feuds that shook her hard-won stability and set her on a path toward escaping the Astor legacy.
Reaching back to the Gilded Age, when that legacy first began to come undone, Alexandra has written an unflinching, mordantly funny account of neglect and class anxiety amid the ruins of a once prominent family. More than an insider's look at a decaying American institution, The Astor Orphan is the debut of a thrilling new voice able to render the secret pains and glories of childhood afresh.
©2013 Alexandra Aldrich (P)2013 HarperCollinsPublishersListeners also enjoyed...
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- Length: 15 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Lala Reyes’ grandmother is descended from a family of renowned rebozo, or shawl-makers. The striped (caramelo) is the most beautiful of all, and the one that makes its way, like the family history it has come to represent, into Lala’s possession. The novel opens with the Reyes’ annual car trip - a caravan overflowing with children, laughter, and quarrels - from Chicago to “the other side”, Mexico City. It is there, each year, that Lala hears her family’s stories, separating the truth from the “healthy lies” that have ricocheted from one generation to the next.
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Love, family, history, and fantasy, Caramelo
- By Michele on 08-07-20
By: Sandra Cisneros
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The Daisy Children
- A Novel
- By: Sofia Grant
- Narrated by: Teri Schnaubelt
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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When Katie Garrett gets the news that she’s received an inheritance from the grandmother she hardly knew, it couldn’t have come at a better time. She flees Boston and travels to rural Texas. There, she’s greeted by her distant cousin Scarlett. Friendly and flamboyant, Scarlett couldn’t be more different from sensible Katie. And as they begin the task of sorting through their grandmother’s possessions, they discover letters and photographs that uncover the hidden truths about their shared history, and the long-forgotten tragedy of the New London school explosion of 1937 that binds them.
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a little odd to me
- By G-Mom on 11-09-24
By: Sofia Grant
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A Girl Named Zippy
- Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana
- By: Haven Kimmel
- Narrated by: Haven Kimmel
- Length: 6 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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When Haven Kimmel was born in 1965, Mooreland, Indiana, was a sleepy little hamlet of 300 people. Nicknamed "Zippy" for the way she would bolt around the house, this small girl was possessed of big eyes and even bigger ears. In this witty and lovingly told memoir, Kimmel takes readers back to a time when small-town America was caught in the amber of the innocent postwar period - people helped their neighbors, went to church on Sunday, and kept barnyard animals in their backyards.
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Beautifully written, beautifully read.
- By shopgirl on 03-06-08
By: Haven Kimmel
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The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender
- By: Leslye Walton
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Magical realism, lyrical prose, and the pain and passion of human love haunt this hypnotic generational saga. Foolish love appears to be the Roux family birthright, an ominous forecast for its most recent progeny, Ava Lavender.
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Beautiful and Haunting Fairytale
- By FanB14 on 07-24-15
By: Leslye Walton
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How to Survive a Summer
- A Novel
- By: Nick White
- Narrated by: Michael Crouch
- Length: 12 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Grad student Will Dillard has largely buried memories of the summer he spent at a camp intended to "cure" homosexuality. But when he finds out a horror movie based on the camp is hitting theaters, he's forced to face his past - and his role in another camper's death. As he recounts the events surrounding his "failed rehabilitation", Will strikes out on an impromptu road trip back home to Mississippi, eventually returning to the abandoned campgrounds to solve the mysteries of that pivotal summer.
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A story full of heart and healing
- By ZippyBippy on 05-06-18
By: Nick White
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The Plague of Doves
- By: Louise Erdrich
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James, Kathleen McInerney
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation.
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Avoid this Plague
- By Andre on 05-16-08
By: Louise Erdrich
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Apocalypse Child
- A Life in End Times - a Memoir
- By: Flor Edwards
- Narrated by: Flor Edwards
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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For the first 13 years of her life, Flor Edwards grew up in the Children of God. The group's nomadic existence was based on the belief that, as God's chosen people, they would be saved in the impending apocalypse that would envelop the rest of the world in 1993. Flor would be 13 years old. The group's charismatic leader, Father David, kept the family on the move, from Los Angeles to Bangkok to Chicago, where they would eventually disband, leaving Flor to make sense of the foreign world of mainstream society around her.
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A truly unique background and story
- By Asaph on 04-13-18
By: Flor Edwards
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Memphis
- A Novel
- By: Tara M. Stringfellow
- Narrated by: Karen Murray, Adenrele Ojo, Tara Stringfellow
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Summer 1995: Ten-year-old Joan, her mother, and her younger sister flee her father’s explosive temper and seek refuge at her mother’s ancestral home in Memphis. This is not the first time violence has altered the course of the family’s trajectory. Half a century earlier, Joan’s grandfather built this majestic house in the historic Black neighborhood of Douglass—only to be lynched days after becoming the first Black detective in the city. Joan tries to settle into her new life, but family secrets cast a longer shadow than any of them expected.
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Awful narrator
- By Rachael edwards on 06-07-22
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Paradise
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 15 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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In Paradise - her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain", assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void.
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MORRISON AT HER MOST COMPLEX
- By Kennedi Hill on 11-07-19
By: Toni Morrison
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Like Family
- Growing Up in Other People's Houses, a Memoir
- By: Paula McLain
- Narrated by: Wendy Tremont King
- Length: 9 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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This powerful and haunting memoir details the years Paula McLain and her two sisters spent as foster children after being abandoned by both parents in California in the early 1970s. As wards of the State, the sisters spent the next 14 years moving from foster home to foster home. The dislocations, confusions, and odd pleasures of an unrooted life form the basis of one of the most compelling memoirs in recent years - a book in the tradition of Jo Ann Beard's The Boys of My Youth and Mary Karr's The Liars' Club.
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A famous writer describes her life growing up in foster care
- By Nancy C. on 12-21-18
By: Paula McLain
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Lit
- A Memoir
- By: Mary Karr
- Narrated by: Mary Karr
- Length: 12 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Lit follows Mary Karr's descent into the inferno of alcoholism and madness - and her astonishing resurrection. Karr's longing for a solid family seems secure when her marriage to a handsome, Shakespeare-quoting poet produces a son they adore. But she can't outrun her apocalyptic past. She drinks herself into the same numbness that nearly devoured her charismatic but troubled mother, reaching the brink of suicide. A hair-raising stint in "The Mental Marriott" awakens her to the possibility of joy, and leads her to an unlikely faith.
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Finally! One for the "Win" column
- By Kim on 03-22-10
By: Mary Karr
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Beer Money
- A Memoir of Privilege and Loss
- By: Frances Stroh
- Narrated by: Erin Bennett
- Length: 6 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Frances Stroh's earliest memories are ones of great privilege: shopping trips to London and New York, lunches served by black-tied waiters at the Regency Hotel, and a house filled with precious antiques, which she was forbidden to touch. Established in Detroit in 1850, by 1984 the Stroh Brewing Company had become the largest private beer fortune in America and a brand emblematic of the American dream itself; while Stroh was coming of age, the Stroh family fortune was estimated to be worth $700 million.
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Beer boring
- By Richard E. Putt Jr. on 05-22-16
By: Frances Stroh
What listeners say about The Astor Orphan
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Emilie
- 07-23-21
Unsatisfying ending to a frustrating story
The story told in this book is tragic, certainly. The decline of the Astor family and fortune means the main character is raised in hunger and squalor, amidst the adults of the family warring with each other about who is worthy of the few remaining assets left to the family and refusing to sell the mansion and grounds which could finance the next generation. Neither of her parents work, one clearly receding into depression while the other appears to have an illicit affair and child. Most of the happenings aren’t particularly terrible, and there are certainly a few bright or interesting spots in the tale, but it generally comes off as whiny and generates little sympathy or empathy in the reader/listener. I persisted, hoping for some sort of happy ending or at least uplifting twist as the child ages. Instead, the memoir ends abruptly as she goes off to boarding school. While she feels abandoned by everyone, she is not actually orphaned. I wish I had also abandoned the book, as it added nothing to my life and was generally depressing and frustrating to listen to. The narrator’s whiny childish tone is spot on, but unpleasant. If you want to read a memoir of bygone glamour, this is NOT it.
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- Dr. J. Adrienne Roth
- 06-14-21
Exceptionally Disappointing
A better written historical account of the family could have been riveting and more engaging. This was just a series of complaints and characterizations
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- ProfLSW
- 05-27-22
Pathetic
I don’t know what the point of this book was it a memoir of people or other place? The people are pathetic, there is not one redeeming quality of anybody discussed here. I don’t know why I listen to the end but don’t waste your time. It’s very self indulgent.
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- Jenna
- 06-18-21
It was just getting interesting and then the end..
I wanted to like this - it had an interesting premise, but for me, it just sort of ended when I was getting most interested in the main character. There was potential here but I wanted more.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Joanna Hartell
- 07-17-21
Not the best book
Some parts of this did resonate, I think all or many of us raised in the 60’s and 70’s felt a sense of abandonment and lack of parenting. But this book was snively. I just listened to Shallow End Gene Pool- that was a better book about growing up in a storied family. And kind of similar
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- ACT
- 01-15-23
Very disappointing
This book had so much potential. Great premise, one of my favorite narrators, such an interesting period. But I dragged through it, being so disjointed, superficial and purposeless. When I thought the main character would finally have a chance to fulfill her hopes and dreams, it ended! Not even an epilogue to give us closure.
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- D. Richmond
- 01-19-24
Too short
I wanted to know What happened after she went to school. that's where the story ends it leaves you hanging?
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- Cat W.
- 06-30-21
The Disappointing Orphan
Great premise, but no real story line. A collection of disparate memories that never had a plan as to where to go.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Linda G McDonough
- 06-19-21
Disappointing
I normally love memoirs and this one has an interesting premise. However, there is very little insight or growth in the main character and her self awareness is limited. We feel sorry for her but she is not overly likable. I found the narrator annoying and the ending completely unsatisfying. It’s like the story just stops mid stream and we are left hanging.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Lynn Maudlin
- 06-12-21
A snapshot that doesn't quite satisfy
There's so much which is compelling about this book but, in the end, I am frustrated because it *feels* unfinished. I trust that somewhere down the road Alexandra Aldrich will share more of her life story but, right now, the ending is abrupt - I feel like Teddy just ran one of his vehicles into a wall! :/
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