Same audiobooks.
Different story.

Within the first few pages of The Vanishing Half, I knew I was reading something special. In this slow-burn novel, twins Desiree and Stella grow up in Mallard, a small black community in segregated Louisiana that prides itself on the lightness of its people’s skin. At sixteen, the twins flee from Mallard after their mother pulls them out of school to work cleaning white people’s houses, sacrificing the familiarity of home, the safety of their community, and the predictable trajectory of their lives. In New Orleans, the twins begin their new lives together, but eventually Stella takes off on her own, choosing to live the rest of her life “passing” as white; Desiree marries a dark-skinned man, has a child who looks like him, and ends up living back in Mallard. The consequences of the twins’ life choices unfold throughout the book, from the 1950s to the 1990s, and include the lives (and perspectives) of their daughters, Kennedy and Jude. The Vanishing Half is a fascinating story about family relationships, identity, and belonging, and I savored every page.

Anika
Phinney Books

Sin Eater takes a little-known historical role and expands it in this imaginative novel set in an alternate Elizabethan England. For stealing a loaf of bread, teenage orphan May is forced to become a sin eater—shackled with a metal collar proclaiming her status to all she meets and with a black "S" tattooed on her tongue. Shunned by society, sin eaters must only speak to the dying, who tell them their sins. Each sin corresponds with a food item—raisins for adultery, mustard seeds for lies, etc. By eating the "sins," the sin eater takes them on as their own, releasing the dead person's soul. At first distraught from the isolation and contempt her new lot in life brings, May gradually realizes that it isn't without its benefits. One of those benefits is access to the court of Queen Bethany (a thinly veiled Queen Elizabeth I), where courtesans are being murdered and accusations of witchcraft are flying. Fans of Uprooted, Spinning Silver, and Godshot will find similar themes in this fast-paced, high-stakes adventure.

Haley
Phinney Books

Nearly every discussion of Chesnutt's 1901 novel, only recently acknowledged as one of the masterpieces of its time, focuses, understandably, on the real event it was inspired by: the white riot in Wilmington, NC, in 1898 that overthrew the biracial elected city government. And that's part of the reason to turn back to it over a century later (when it feels like times have hardly changed). But the other is Chesnutt's wizardry as a social novelist: his ability to trace the box limiting empathy and imagination that each character carries around, and then to construct scenes that force them to the edges of those boxes (where, almost always, they end up turning back toward convention). It's a funny, tragic, brutal, and deeply human story.

Tom
Phinney Books

For over a decade Leovy has reported on murder in L.A., especially on the killing of black men (and boys) by black men (and boys) in the south side of the city, and in Ghettoside she does justice to a vast and varied range of characters: victims (often chosen nearly at random), killers (often motivated by revenge), witnesses (often terrified and reluctant), and especially the few dogged homicide detectives who refuse to shrug and let murders go unsolved. And from this daily tragedy she builds a compelling conclusion: that black-on-black homicide flourishes because it is not punished; while the law harasses African Americans over pretexts and petty crimes, it declines to protect them from the worst crime of all. It's a complex, subtly skillful, and necessary book.

Tom
Phinney Books

"Solitude" is a seductive word in our chaotic times, but Johnson doesn't just mean a quiet week in the woods to rejuvenate us for the rat race. His solitude is a lifelong vocation, a choice made by the artists he profiles—and by himself—to live as "solitaries," uncoupled for the most part (and often celibate) and devoted to creative work that unites them not with a single person but with all of humanity. Some of his ideals are familiar (Thoreau, Dickinson, and Cezanne, from whom he borrows his cover image), but he also includes Rabindranath Tagore, Nina Simone, Bill Cunningham, and even rehabilitates Rod McKuen! The most moving passages concern his self-described "bent sexuality" and his family's formative friendship with their neighboring monks in Kentucky, including Thomas Merton. You'll be glad to draw some deep breaths of rarer air with his help.

Tom
Phinney Books

My usual policy (with a few notable exceptions) is that an audiobook is almost always better when read by the author, who brings, if nothing else, the emotional resonance of speaking words she has written. In no case so far has that paid off as grandly as with this book and this author, a born actress herself, not for her polish but for what feels like its opposite, a swervy, drolly impulsive style of speech that keeps surprising you mid-sentence—mid-word!—with shifts in rhythm and emphasis. its a good match for her tale—a grownup daughter recalling the once-famous Irish actress who was her mother—which follows no pat arc of a life but is deliciously full of sentence-by-sentence observations and odd bits of fully lived life, mostly in 1970s Dublin. A treat.

Tom
Phinney Books