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The World of Normal Boys
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Blake Kevin Dwyer
- Length: 12 hrs and 47 mins
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Publisher's summary
Winner of the Lambda Literary Award
"This first novel is so eloquent because it is hellbent on collaring the reader and telling him or her the whole passionate story." (Edmund White, author of Our Young Man)
"This is a rich and unflinching book." (The New York Times Book Review)
"Extraordinary...an exhilarating experience...that Soehnlein has produced as his first novel a work of such maturity and excellence is little short of astounding." (Fenton Johnson, author of Scissors, Paper, Rock)
The time is the late 1970s—an age of gas shortages, head shops, and Saturday Night Fever. The place, suburban New Jersey. At a time when the teenagers around him are coming of age, Robin MacKenzie is coming undone. While "normal boys" are into cars, sports, and bullying their classmates, Robin enjoys day trips to New York City with his elegant mother, spinning fantastic tales for her amusement in an intimate ritual he has come to love. He dutifully plays the role of the good son for his meat-and-potatoes father, even as his own mind is a jumble of sexual confusion and painful self-doubt. But everything changes in one, horrifying instant when a tragic accident wakes his family from their middle-American dream and plunges them into a spiral of slow destruction.
As his family falls apart day by day, Robin finds himself pulling away from the unquestioned, unexamined life that has been carefully laid out for him. Small acts of rebellion lead to larger questions of what it means to stand on his own. Falling into a fevered triangle with two other outcasts, Todd Spicer and Scott Schatz, Robin embarks on an explosive odyssey of sexual self-discovery that will take him beyond the spring-green lawns of suburbia, beyond the fraying fabric barely holding together his quickly unraveling family, and into a complex future, beyond the world of normal boys.
"Karl Soehnlein's stunning first novel reads like a cross between the film American Beauty and Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story." (The Advocate)
"The World of Normal Boys is a work of authenticity, as relevant to those who lived a similar coming-of-age experience many years ago as it will be to those who are living that experience now." (Bay Area Reporter)
"An amusingly detailed and largely accurate picture of life in the Jersey 'burbs." (Publishers Weekly)
"Full of tension and suspense, Soehnlein's well-paced debut novel is a fresh look at one boy's sexual awakening in the 1970s and his journey to find a place where he can fit it." (Booklist)
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- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 12 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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The author of Break in Case of Emergency follows up her the “extraordinary debut” (The Guardian) with a moving novel about motherhood and marriage, adolescence and bodily autonomy, family and love, religion and sexuality, and the delicate balance between the purity of faith and the messy reality of life.
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Just OK - Considered Bailing
- By Madeleine Homan on 04-18-21
By: Jessica Winter
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Where I Left Her
- By: Amber Garza
- Narrated by: Vivienne Leheny
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Whitney had some misgivings when she dropped her increasingly moody teenage daughter, Amelia, off at Lauren’s house. She’d never met the parents, and usually she’d go in, but Amelia clearly wasn’t going to let something so humiliating happen, so instead Whitney waved to her daughter before pulling away from the little house with the roses in front. But when she goes back the next day, an elderly couple answers the door - Amelia and Lauren aren’t there, and this couple swears they never were, that she’s at the wrong house.
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Kept me guessing!!
- By Sheppardspie on 09-13-21
By: Amber Garza
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Reprieve
- A Novel
- By: James Han Mattson
- Narrated by: JD Jackson
- Length: 12 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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On April 27, 1997, four contestants make it to the final cell of the Quigley House, a full-contact haunted escape room in Lincoln, Nebraska, made famous for its monstrosities, booby-traps, and ghoulishly costumed actors. If the group can endure these horrors without shouting the safe word, “reprieve,” they’ll win a substantial cash prize - a startling feat accomplished only by one other group in the house’s long history. But before they can complete the challenge, a man breaks into the cell and kills one of the contestants.
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creepy escape room story
- By Barbara S on 11-18-21
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The Mayfair Moon
- The Darkwoods Trilogy, Book 1
- By: J.A. Redmerski
- Narrated by: Kate Reinders
- Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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After a nightmarish encounter with a werewolf, 17-year-old Adria Dawson loses her sister, but gains the love of a mysterious young man and his legendary family. Strange and tragic things begin to happen in the small town of Hallowell, Maine: residents come down with an unexplainable 'illness' and some disappear. In the midst of everything, Isaac Mayfair is adamant about keeping Adria safe, even from her sister whom he has warned her to stay away from.
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An average book which would appeal to werewolf fan
- By Suzanne Finnegan on 08-09-13
By: J.A. Redmerski
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The Time Traveler's Wife
- By: Audrey Niffenegger
- Narrated by: Fred Berman, Phoebe Strole
- Length: 17 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Clare and Henry have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was 36. They were married when Clare was 23 and Henry was 31. Impossible but true, because Henry is one of the first people diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder: periodically his genetic clock resets and he finds himself misplaced in time, pulled to moments of emotional gravity from his life, past and future. His disappearances are spontaneous, his experiences unpredictable, alternately harrowing and amusing.
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One of my favorite books
- By Joey on 01-13-08
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To Be With You
- By: TJ O'Shea
- Narrated by: Amy Deuchler
- Length: 16 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Leah Vasquez and Victoria Lockwood should not fall in love. They're smart enough to know a star-crossed lovers situation never works. Leah's a loner from the poor side of town, working two jobs, and aching to leave their sleepy hometown in her rear view forever. Victoria lives in a mansion with her overbearing parents, surrounded by friends and known to none of them, living what others consider a charmed life. When Leah rescues Victoria from a freak rainstorm, they discover an unexpected understanding, and an undeniable spark.
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Excuse Me While I Weep…
- By HunniBFly84 on 10-12-24
By: TJ O'Shea
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The End and Other Beginnings
- Stories from the Future
- By: Veronica Roth
- Narrated by: Emily Rankin, MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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No world is like the other. Within this masterful collection, each setting is more strange and wonderful than the last, brimming with new technologies and beings. And yet, for all the advances in these futuristic lands, the people still must confront deeply human problems. In these six stories, Veronica Roth reaches into the unknown and draws forth something startlingly familiar and profoundly beautiful.
By: Veronica Roth
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Thirsty
- By: Mia Hopkins
- Narrated by: Ozzie Rodriguez
- Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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My name is Salvador Rosas. Back in the barrio, my past is written on the walls: ESHB. Short for East Side Hollenbeck, my father's gang - my gang. Hell, it's a family tradition, one that sent both my brothers away. They used to call me "Ghost" because I haunted people's dreams. Now I've got nothing going for me except a hipster gringo mentoring me in a new career. An ex-con making craft beer? No mames. Still, people in this neighborhood look out for one another.
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Really good ....
- By AMSullivan1077 on 04-07-19
By: Mia Hopkins
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Growing Things and Other Stories
- By: Paul Tremblay
- Narrated by: Sean Crisden, Graham Halstead, Cassandra Campbell, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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A chilling collection of psychological suspense and literary horror from the multiple award-winning author of the national best seller The Cabin at the End of the World and A Head Full of Ghosts. A masterful anthology featuring 19 pieces of short fiction, Growing Things and Other Stories is an exciting glimpse into Paul Tremblay’s fantastically fertile imagination.
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Paul Tremblay is totally nuts.
- By Gary & Jay on 07-07-19
By: Paul Tremblay
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Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See
- By: Juliann Garey
- Narrated by: Dan Butler
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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In her tour-de-force first novel, Juliann Garey takes us inside the restless mind, ravaged heart, and anguished soul of Greyson Todd, a successful Hollywood studio executive who leaves his wife and young daughter and for a decade travels the world giving free reign to the bipolar disorder he's been forced to keep hidden for almost 20 years.
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Psychosis or Syphilis?
- By Vira on 04-02-13
By: Juliann Garey
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Nero
- Made Men, Book 1
- By: Sarah Brianne
- Narrated by: Aaron Landon
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Nero is the king of Legacy Prep, living a life of power. Elle is the school's punching bag, living a life of fear.
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two words...Amazing and hott!
- By Jenee's Reviews on 09-15-15
By: Sarah Brianne
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A Good Country
- A Novel
- By: Laleh Khadivi
- Narrated by: Assaf Cohen
- Length: 8 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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A timely novel about the radicalization of a Muslim teen in California - about where identity truly lies, and how we find it. Laguna Beach, California, 2010. Reza Courdee, a 14-year-old straight-A student and chemistry whiz, takes his first hit of pot. In as long as it takes to inhale and exhale, he is transformed from the high-achieving son of Iranian immigrants into a happy-go-lucky stoner.
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A very important contribution
- By Mia on 05-29-17
By: Laleh Khadivi
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If You See Her
- By: Ania Ahlborn
- Narrated by: Brian Holden
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The house on Old Mill Road has stood in an open field for longer than Jesse Wells has been alive, its crooked windows and jutting turret tormenting the kids of Warsaw, Michigan the way only a haunted house knows how. Everyone imagines that something terrible lurks within the house’s abandoned rooms - especially Jesse and his two closest friends, Casey and Reed. But when Reed chooses the house as a backdrop for his own suicide, childhood ghost stories are transformed into a nightmare that sends Jesse into a downward spiral of grief.
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DNF. Quit halfway through. A slog.
- By Smart, AZ on 07-10-22
By: Ania Ahlborn
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What listeners say about The World of Normal Boys
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Paul
- 08-03-23
Understated and effective performance
I liked the book very much. A very well-conceived and written story. The narration was interesting. Not a lot of drama in his voice which I decided I appreciated. It made moments of intensity all the more powerful. A book I recently read, My Love Story, by Tina Turner, was narrated by someone who loaded each sentence with dialed up drama. It was ridiculous. So it was a pleasure to have a story read more simply with emphasis in just the right places. As you can see, I have given it five stars across the board.
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- Shaun England
- 04-13-24
Sad and Amazing
The sexual details of such a young boy were uncomfortable but I was for sure that little boy at that age doing even worse and putting myself in bad situations. I felt sorry for him because it felt like he was constantly being used. He was clearly more emotionally mature than Scott but still, it felt like everyone just used him. Fantastic book! I really enjoyed it. I'd love to see what happens to the parents and even Robin.
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- Richard Stewart
- 04-27-23
Sweet but maybe a little too sexy
There were parts of this that I loved, but I also thought the focus on the sex life of thirteen year old Robin was a little skeevy. I had sex for the first time at barely sixteen, and I think I was a little ahead of most of my peers (this was in the mid 80s, just a little later than the book is set). Robin also often has a kind of world weariness that seemed ahead of his years, although his moments of confusion and acting out are very authentic.
Soehnlein has a great sense of family dynamics, and there are some lovely vivid moments.
The narration is just okay. The reader does a good job with dialogue but often settles into a kind of robotic cadence.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Andre
- 04-08-23
Incredible!
Wow, what a powerful debut novel. I lived through that period. While my experiences widely differ from those of the protagonist, Robin, the book was accurate in describing the mixed-signals that gay teens sent in that era and their struggle for normalcy. The book is grounded in a moment of time and feels timeless, universal even. This is powerful writing that made me want to cheer or cry. I highly recommend it.
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- Anonymous User
- 04-07-24
Searching for his voice
The character of Robin was very interesting to me … as a gay boy there were certainly similarities… but his ability to be “pushed around” seemed sometimes frustrating .., why didn’t he and Ruby tell the truth about the bullying… it would have made a huge difference … it was very interesting how he searched for his VOICE in such confused ways … I wonder what his life became … his mess of a mother and a father who was afraid of him … maybe a sequel ???
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- Anonymous User
- 05-03-23
Excellent.
Finally a realistic coming of age story. Not watered down PG nonsense. Captures the feelings and frustrations of a young gay teen.
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- James V. Donahue
- 04-21-23
This story rings true!!!
I loved this wonderful, well written, greatly performed story!!! This story may be a fictional novel but it sure rings True!!!
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- John Scott
- 12-03-23
Stunning, entrancing, haunting
The honesty of this story is gut-wrenching. As a “not normal” boy, I can attest to the authenticity of the confusion, mis-read signals, darkly tempting world and distinct loneliness of the Robins furiously working to have things make sense but coming up short. This is a tragic parable of the coming-of-age of a “not normal” boy. It is certainly not the only truth, but it is one.
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- Vasco
- 07-11-24
Monotonous narration
Monotonous narration. Good to fall asleep to. Narration is hypnotic. Now I pay attention to who is narrating.
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- Michael Beilenson
- 10-12-24
What's the reason?
That's the question I kept answering myself throughout this entire book. Not really a story just random scenes that don't make much sense and then the author throws in unnecessary sexual bantering that he uses to hopefully keep your attention.. I'm not sure if this is a rough draft. This is actually the book.
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