Kalisha Buckhanon has 5 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 6 narrators. The most-rated is Speaking of Summer.
Solemn
Summary
Solemn Redvine is a precocious Mississippi girl who senses a nearby baby may be her half sibling - the outcome of her father's mistakes with a married woman who lives in their trailer park. After Solemn witnesses a man throwing the baby down a community well, she struggles to understand the event, leaving her forever changed. As Solemn finds refuge in fantasies of stardom as well as friendships with her brother's wife and a nearby girl, the ill-fated baby's doomed mother disappears without a trace. Solemn remains trapped by connections to the missing other woman and an honest cop who suspects there is more to the story than others on the small local police force want to see. When her father's next mistake - a robbery - lands Solemn in a group home for troubled girls, she meets a Chicago delinquent who wants to escape. There, Solemn must face the truth of who she really is and what she is really made of.
©2016 Kalisha Buckhanon (P)2016 Recorded Books
Conception
Summary
In the same vein as her critically acclaimed debut novel, Upstate, Kalisha Buckhanon again shares an emotionally beautiful story about today’s youth that magnifies the unforgettable power of hope and the human spirit. Buckhanon takes us to Chicago 1992, and into the life of 15-year-old Shivana Montgomery, who believes all Black women wind up the same: single and raising children alone, like her mother. Until the sudden visit of her beautiful and free-spirited Aunt Jewel, Shivana spends her days desperately struggling to understand life and confront the challenges she faces growing up in a tough environment. When she accidentally becomes pregnant by an older man and must decide what to do, she begins a journey toward adulthood with only a mysterious voice inside to guide her. Then, when she falls in love with Rasul, a teenager with problems of his own, together they fight to rise above their circumstances and move toward a more positive future. Through a narrative that sweeps from slavery onward, Buckhanon unveils Shivana’s connection to a past filled with tragedy, courage, and wisdom.
©2008 Kalisha Buckhanon (P)2008 Books on Tape
Pick Me
Summary
While struggling with infertility, Candy and Frankie, a mixed-race couple living in Chicago, decide to adopt a black child. Despite objections from their wildly different families, who beg the couple to go the more "traditional route", Candy and Frankie schedule an appointment with the Department of Child Family Services in the hopes of finding not an infant, but a toddler - a child "no one else wants". Beautifully rendered in a voice unlike any other in contemporary fiction, Pick Me grapples with notions of race, privilege, and ambition in the modern age - and the strain those forces can put on a relationship.
©2015 Kalisha Buckhanon (P)2016 Audible, Inc.
Upstate
Summary
This program is read by Black Panther star, Chadwick Boseman "Baby, the first thing I need to know from you is, do you believe I killed my father?" So begins Upstate, a powerful story told through letters between 17-year-old Antonio and his 16-year-old girlfriend, Natasha, set in the 1990's in New York. Antonio and Natasha's world is turned upside down, and their young love is put to the test, when Antonio finds himself in jail, accused of a shocking crime. Antonio fights to stay alive on the inside, while on the outside, Natasha faces choices that will change her life. Over the course of a decade, they share a desperate correspondence. Often, they have only each other to turn to as life takes them down separate paths and leaves them wondering if they will ever find their way back together. Startling, real, and filled with raw emotion, Upstate is an unforgettable coming-of-age story with a message of undeniable hope. Brilliant and profoundly felt, it is destined to speak to a new generation of listeners.
©2005 Kalisha Buckhanon (P)2005 Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC
Speaking of Summer
Summary
On a cold December evening, Autumn Spencer's twin sister Summer walks to the roof of their shared Harlem brownstone and is never seen again - the door to the roof is locked, and no footprints are found. Faced with authorities indifferent to another missing woman, Autumn must pursue answers on her own, all while grieving her mother's recent death. With her friends and neighbors, Autumn pretends to hold up through the crisis. She falls into an affair with Summer's boyfriend to cope with the disappearance of a woman they both loved. But the loss becomes too great, the mystery too inexplicable, and Autumn starts to unravel, all the while becoming obsessed with murdered women and the men who kill them. In Speaking of Summer, critically acclaimed author Kalisha Buckhanon has created a postmodern, fast-paced story of urban peril and victim invisibility, and the fight to discover truth at any cost.
©2019 Kalisha Buckhanon (P)2019 Recorded Books