Amy Jo Burns has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators. The most-rated is Cinderland: A Memoir.
Shiner
Summary
Named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR "Amy Jo Burns writes a version of Appalachia that is one step removed from magic - all strychnine and moonshine and powerful wonder." (NPR) "[A] wrenching testament, told in language as incandescent as smoldering coal... This is not a despairing book, but a hopeful one, of Appalachian women taking back their life stories." (New York Times Book Review) On a lush mountaintop trapped in time, two women vow to protect each other at all costs - and one young girl must defy her father to survive. An hour from the closest West Virginia mining town, 15-year-old Wren Bird lives in a cloistered mountain cabin with her parents. They have no car, no mailbox, and no visitors - except for her mother's lifelong best friend. Every Sunday, Wren's father delivers winding sermons in an abandoned gas station, where he takes up serpents and praises the Lord for his blighted white eye, proof of his divinity and key to the hold he has over the community, over Wren and her mother. But over the course of one summer, a miracle performed by Wren's father quickly turns to tragedy. As the order of her world begins to shatter, Wren must uncover the truth of her father's mysterious legend and her mother's harrowing history and complex bond with her best friend. And with that newfound knowledge, Wren can imagine a different future for herself than she has been told to expect. Rich with epic love and epic loss, and diving deep into a world that is often forgotten but still part of America, Shiner reveals the hidden story behind two generations' worth of Appalachian heartbreak and resolve. Amy Jo Burns brings us a smoldering, taut debut novel about modern female myth-making in a land of men - and one young girl who must ultimately open her eyes.
©2020 Amy Jo Burns (P)2020 Penguin Audio
Cinderland: A Memoir
Summary
A riveting literary debut about the cost of keeping quiet. Amy Jo Burns grew up in Mercury, Pennsylvania, an industrial town humbled by the steel collapse of the 1980s. Instead of the construction booms and twelve-hour shifts her parents' generation had known, the Mercury Amy Jo knew was marred by empty houses, old strip mines, and vacant lots. It wasn't quite a ghost town - only because many people had no choice but to stay. The year Burns turned ten, this sleepy town suddenly woke up. Howard Lotte, its beloved piano teacher, was accused of sexually assaulting his female students. Among the countless girls questioned, only seven came forward. For telling the truth, the town ostracized these girls and accused them of trying to smear a good man's reputation. As for the remaining girls - well, they were smarter. They lied. Burns was one of them. But such a lie has its own consequences. Against a backdrop of fire and steel, shame and redemption, Burns tells of the boys she ran from and toward, the friends she abandoned, and the endless performances she gave to please a town that never trusted girls in the first place. This is the story of growing up in a town that both worshipped and sacrificed its youth - a town that believed being a good girl meant being a quiet one - and the long road Burns took toward forgiving her ten-year-old self. Cinderland is an elegy to that young girl's innocence, as well as a praise song to the curative powers of breaking a long silence.
©2014 Amy Jo Burns (P)2014 Audible Inc.