The Book of Polly
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Jenna Lamia
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By:
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Kathy Hepinstall
About this listen
With a kick like the best hot sauce, this is the laugh-out-loud story of a girl determined to keep up with her aging, crazy-as-a-fox mother.
Willow Havens is 10 years old and obsessed with the fear that her mother will die. Her mother, Polly, is a cantankerous, take-no-prisoners Southern woman who lives to chase varmints, drink margaritas, and antagonize the neighbors - and she sticks out like a sore thumb among the young, modern mothers of their small conventional Texas town. She was in her late 50s when Willow was born, so Willow knows she's here by accident, a late-life afterthought. Willow's father died before she was born, her much older brother and sister are long grown and gone and failing elsewhere. It's just her and bigger-than-life Polly.
Willow is desperately hungry for clues to the family life that preceded her, and especially Polly's life pre-Willow. Why did she leave her hometown of Bethel, Louisiana, 50 years ago and vow never to return? Who is Garland Jones, her long-ago suitor who possibly killed a man? And will Polly be able to outrun the Bear, the illness that finally puts her on a collision course with her past?
The Book of Polly has a great blend of humor and sadness, pathos and hilarity. This is a bittersweet novel about the grip of love in a truly quirky family, and you'll come to know one of the most unforgettable mother-daughter duos you've ever met.
©2017 Kathy Hepinstall (P)2017 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Delightful...funny and poignant." (People)
"A mother/daughter comedy steeped in quirky characters, personal history mysteries, and no small amount of love, The Book of Polly is a delightful read about one of the world's most fundamental relationships." (Refinery29)
"Hepinstall’s Southern coming-of-age novel...[is] full of laughter and warmth and sadness. This is a warm and fresh tale." (Publishers Weekly)
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The underground mine fires ravaging Pennsylvania coal country have forced 11-year-old Brigid Howley and her family to seek refuge with her estranged grandparents, the formidable Gram and the black lung-stricken Gramp. Tragedy is no stranger to the Howleys, a proud Irish-American clan who takes strange pleasure in the "curse" laid upon them generations earlier by a priest who ran afoul of the Molly Maguires. The weight of this legacy rests heavily on a new generation, when Brigid, already struggling to keep her family together, makes a grisly discovery in a long-abandoned bootleg mine shaft.
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Disfunction makes a good read
- By NHull on 05-30-14
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Our Story Begins
- New and Selected Stories
- By: Tobias Wolff
- Narrated by: Anthony Heald
- Length: 13 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Wolff here returns with fresh revelations - about biding one's time, or experiencing first love, or burying one's mother - that come to a variety of characters in circumstances at once everyday and extraordinary. A retired Marine enrolls in college while her son trains for Iraq. A lawyer takes a difficult deposition. An American in Rome indulges the Gypsy who's picked his pocket.
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Great
- By chris on 04-11-08
By: Tobias Wolff
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Stories
- All-New Tales
- By: Neil Gaiman - author/editor, Al Sarrantonio - editor, Joe Hill, and others
- Narrated by: Anne Bobby, Jonathan Davis, Katherine Kellgren, and others
- Length: 18 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The best stories pull readers in and keep them turning the pages, eager to discover more—to find the answer to the question: "And then what happened?" The true hallmark of great literature is great imagination, and as Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio prove with this outstanding collection, when it comes to great fiction, all genres are equal.
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Something for Everyone
- By Nicole on 05-24-17
By: Neil Gaiman - author/editor, and others
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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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All the Winters After
- A Novel
- By: Seré Prince Halverson
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Kachemak Winkel never intended to come back to his hometown of Caboose, Alaska, where his family died in a plane crash 20 years earlier. When he finally musters the courage to return and face his painful memories, he's surprised to find a mysterious young woman living in his abandoned house.
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The Old Old Story
- By Bruce on 06-16-16
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Priestdaddy
- A Memoir
- By: Patricia Lockwood
- Narrated by: Patricia Lockwood
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Father Greg Lockwood is unlike any Catholic priest you have ever met - a man who lounges in boxer shorts, who loves action movies, and whose constant jamming on the guitar reverberates "like a whole band dying in a plane crash in 1972". His daughter is an irreverent poet who long ago left the church's country. When an unexpected crisis leads her and her husband to move back into her parents' rectory, their two worlds collide.
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Terrible narration--read, don't listen
- By Penelope on 08-06-17
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Shade of My Own Tree
- By: Sheila Williams
- Narrated by: Patricia R. Floyd
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
When Opal Sullivan walks out on an abusive husband after 15 years, she has only her dreams in her pocket. Her new beginning starts in a graceful but dilapidated house. Like Opal, the house is worn-out and somewhat beaten up, but it still stands proudly and deserves a second chance. Opal opens her doors - and her heart - to a parade of unforgettable characters. It is one of these people who helps Opal understand a funny thing about life: You can't move forward if you keep looking back.
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Im not sure if I wanted this book to end
- By Nichole F. on 05-10-19
By: Sheila Williams
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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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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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A Death in Kitchawank, and Other Stories
- By: T. C. Boyle
- Narrated by: T. C. Boyle
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Few authors write with such sheer love of story and language as T. C. Boyle, and that is nowhere more evident than in his inventive, wickedly funny, and always entertaining short stories. Here are 14 new tales previously unpublished in book form. By turns mythic and realistic, farcical and tragic, ironic and moving, Boyle's stories have mapped a wide range of human emotions. The stories here reflect his maturing themes.
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Mixed Bag
- By AuntGert on 09-22-20
By: T. C. Boyle
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The Visiting Privilege
- New and Collected Stories
- By: Joy Williams
- Narrated by: Richard Powers, Emily Woo Zeller, Elisabeth Rodgers, and others
- Length: 20 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Joy Williams has been celebrated as a master of the short story for four decades, her renown passing from one generation to the next even in the shifting landscape of contemporary writing. And at long last the incredible scope of her singular achievement is put on display: 33 stories drawn from three much-lauded collections and another 13 appearing here for the first time in book form.
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I sure tried.
- By A.C. CALLOWAY on 01-28-24
By: Joy Williams
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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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Hum If You Don't Know the Words
- By: Bianca Marais
- Narrated by: Katharine Lee McEwan, Bahni Turpin
- Length: 14 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Life under Apartheid has created a secure future for Robin Conrad, a 10-year-old white girl living with her parents in 1970s Johannesburg. In the same nation but worlds apart, Beauty Mbali, a Xhosa woman in a rural village in the Bantu homeland of the Transkei, struggles to raise her children alone after her husband's death. Both lives have been built upon the division of race, and their meeting should never have occurred...until the Soweto Uprising.
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Completely wrong accents
- By Debbie on 02-12-22
By: Bianca Marais
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Thank You Baby Jesus!
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If Jenna Lamia reads it, I'll listen to it!
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Laugh-out-loud funny and deeply touching, Beth Hoffman's sparkling debut is, as Kristin Hannah says, "packed full of Southern charm, strong women, wacky humor, and good old-fashioned heart." It is a novel that explores the indomitable strengths of female friendship and gives us the story of a young girl who loses one mother and finds many others.
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A Wonderful Listen!
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Relaxing, interesting, sweet.
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What listeners say about The Book of Polly
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Y
- 06-11-18
Superb, excellent, well-written, enjoyable, best narrator Jenna Lamia brings the characters to life, as usual
I thoroughly enjoyed this book from beginning to end. The main character, Willow, is interesting and believable and her obsession with her elderly mother’s health is realistic and exquisitely well portrayed, as a typical obsession of any worried child. The relationship between her mother, Polly, and her older brother, Shell, was touching and poignant and very real. I enjoyed every single minute of my reading of this book, I am so sad that I finished it, I wish I could just start it over again. I cannot rate this book highly enough. Jenna Lamia is the best narrator out there, and that is how I found this book, by searching for a list of books that she narrates.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 01-23-18
Endearing!!
It’s been a long time since I laughed out loud and shed tears from a book. And Jenna Lamia never disappoints!!
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1 person found this helpful
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- Christine Felts
- 01-26-18
Good book
Book was good. A few plots within one, which made it interesting. Not disappointing.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Yes, More Books Please!
- 03-09-20
Simply Outstanding!
It's been a long time since I fell head-over-heels in love with a story from the very first page, but I really did with this book. It was wonderfully funny one moment and deeply moving the next. These are characters that burst off the page fully formed. Their flaws are all too human, and the little mysteries between them never feel forced or contrived.
Jenna Lamia's narration (The Secret Life of Bees) is perfection.
Do yourself a huge favor and read this book!
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1 person found this helpful
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- Dawn
- 09-09-20
Fantastic Narration
Great story. Loved the author’s writing style. Jenna Lamia’s narration was wonderful and brought the characters to life. Jenna Lamia is always fabulous.
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1 person found this helpful
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- JediInCrimson
- 06-09-19
simply, hysterically southern
loved the story and the narrator. I'm sad it's over. Polly is my new hero! I'll be quoting her for years. I'll listen to this one again.
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1 person found this helpful
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- i got it!
- 08-09-17
thumbs up
i really wasn't too sure about this at the beginning, but ended up liking THE BOOK OF POLLY very much. polly sure had some zingers...i did not like the way she spoke to willow as a child, but as willow became a teen, i found it very endearing -- go figure!
i appreciated that the story moved along, didn't feel like i was getting bogged down just to 'fill up pages'.
excellent narration.
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- publicname
- 07-07-19
Thoroughly enjoyed this book
The narrator was perfect for the voices of Willow and Polly. I hated for this story to end!
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- B. Meyer
- 06-01-19
Perfectly, perfect!
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. This is my first adventure with the immensely talented Kathy Hepinstall.
Her storytelling is a journey of the five senses, with her sixth sense of human nature shinning through each and every character. What a wonderful gift she has!
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- Benjamin M. Stearns
- 09-05-19
Great story, Great Narration
The Book of Polly is a wonderful work of fiction. The diverse group of characters and carefully crafted tale created by Kathy Hepinstall, are brought to life during Jenna Lamia’s truly extraordinary narration. A must read, or listen.
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