Alma Cuervo has narrated 31 audiobooks on Listento.it by 25 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 619 ratings. The most-rated is The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.
Wonder Tales from Around the World
Summary
Traditional stories endure generation after generation because, although they are not literal, they resound in truths on a human scale. Folktales remind us of wisdom so elemental it is often lost in the rush of everyday life - sometimes common sense makes no sense at all.
©1995 Heather Forest (P)2010 Recorded Books
The Liars of Mariposa Island
Summary
From the author of Moxie comes a stunning novel told in three voices about the lies families tell to survive. Every year, summer begins when the Callahans arrive on Mariposa Island. That's when Elena Finney gets to escape her unstable, controlling mother by babysitting for their two children. And the summer of 1986 promises to be extra special when she meets J.C., the new boy in town, whose kisses make Elena feel like she's been transported to a new world. Joaquin Finney can't imagine why anyone would want to come to Mariposa Island. He just graduated from high school and dreams about going to California to find his father and escape his mother's manipulation. The Liars of Mariposa Island follows siblings Elena and Joaquin, with flashbacks to their mother's experience as a teenage refugee fleeing the Cuban revolution. Jennifer Mathieu's multilayered novel explores the nature of secrets, lies, and fierce, destructive love.
©2019 Jennifer Mathieu (P)2019 Recorded Books
The Madonnas of Echo Park
Summary
"We slipped into this country like thieves, onto the land that once was ours." With these words, spoken by an illegal Mexican day laborer, The Madonnas of Echo Park takes us into the unseen world of Los Angeles, following the men and women who cook the meals, clean the homes, and struggle to lose their ethnic identity in the pursuit of the American dream. When a dozen or so girls and mothers gather on an Echo Park street corner to act out a scene from a Madonna music video, they find themselves caught in the crossfire of a drive-by shooting. In the aftermath, Aurora Esperanza grows distant from her mother, Felicia, who as a housekeeper in the Hollywood Hills establishes a unique relationship with a detached housewife. The Esperanzas’ shifting lives connect with those of various members of their neighborhood. A day laborer trolls the streets for work with men half his age and witnesses a murder that pits his morality against his illegal status; a religious hypocrite gets her comeuppance when she meets the Virgin Mary at a bus stop on Sunset Boulevard; a typical bus route turns violent when cultures and egos collide in the night, with devastating results; and Aurora goes on a journey through her gentrified childhood neighborhood in a quest to discover her own history and her place in the land that all Mexican Americans dream of, "the land that belongs to us again." Like the Academy Award–winning film Crash, The Madonnas of Echo Park follows the intersections of its characters and cultures in Los Angeles. In the footsteps of Junot Díaz and Sherman Alexie, Brando Skyhorse in his debut novel gives voice to one neighborhood in Los Angeles with an astonishing— and unforgettable—lyrical power.
©2010 Brando Skyhorse (P)2010 Simon & Schuster
Night at the Fiestas
Summary
Set in Northern New Mexico, an astonishing, beautifully rendered debut about living in a landscape shaped by love, loss, and violence. With intensity, dark humor, and emotional precision, Kirstin Valdez Quade's unforgettable stories plunge us into the fierce, troubled hearts of characters torn between their desires to escape the past and to plumb its depths. The deadbeat father of a pregnant teenager tries to transform his life by playing the role of Jesus in a bloody penitential Passion. A young man discovers that his estranged father and a boa constrictor have been squatting in his grandmother's empty house. A young woman finds herself at an impasse when she is asked to hear her priest's confession. Always hopeful, these stories chart the passions and obligations of family life, exploring themes of race, class, and coming of age as Quade's characters protect, betray, wound, undermine, bolster, define, and ultimately save one another.
©2015 Kirstin Valdez Quade (P)2015 Recorded Books
Supreme Ambition
Summary
The Washington Post journalist and legal expert Ruth Marcus goes behind the scenes to document the inside story of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation battle and the Republican plot to take over the Supreme Court - 30 years in the making - in this “impressively reported, highly insightful, and rollicking good read” (The New York Times Book Review). In the summer of 2018 the drama unfolded so fast it seemed to come out of nowhere. With the power of the #MeToo movement behind her, a terrified but composed Christine Blasey Ford walked into a Senate hearing room to accuse Kavanaugh of sexual assault. This unleashed unprecedented fury from a Supreme Court nominee who accused Democrats of a “calculated and orchestrated political hit”. But behind this showdown was a much bigger one. The Washington Post journalist and legal expert Ruth Marcus documents the 30-year mission by conservatives to win a majority on the Supreme Court and the lifelong ambition of Brett Kavanaugh to secure his place in that victory. The reporting in Supreme Ambition is full of revealing and weighty headlines, as Marcus answers the most pressing questions surrounding this historical moment: How did Kavanaugh get the nomination? Was Blasey Ford’s testimony credible? What does his confirmation mean for the future of the court? Were the Democrats outgunned from the start? On the way, she uncovers secret White House meetings, intense lobbying efforts, private confrontations on Capitol Hill, and lives forever upended on both coasts. This “extraordinarily detailed” (The Washington Post) pause resister traces how Brett Kavanaugh deftly maneuvered to become the nominee and how he quashed resistance from Republicans and from a president reluctant to reward a George W. Bush loyalist. It shows a Republican party that had concluded Kavanaugh was too big to fail, with senators and the FBI ignoring potentially devastating evidence against him. And it paints a picture of Democratic leaders unwilling to engage in the no-holds-barred partisan warfare that might have defeated the nominee. In the tradition of The Brethren and The Power Broker, Supreme Ambition is the definitive account of a pivotal moment in modern history, one that will shape the judicial system of America for generations to come.
©2019 Simon & Schuster (P)2019 Simon & Schuster
A Drowned Maiden's Hair
Summary
Laura Amy Schlitz delivers this Horn Book Fanfare and Cybils Award-winning best-seller that whisks 11-year-old Maud Flynn from a cold New England orphanage and into the stately mansion of three wealthy spinsters. After the Hawthorne sisters adopt her in 1909, they tell her she's their secret child. She must remain indoors at all times and must never stand in front of windows. Since these old ladies treat her so well, Maud doesn't mind their restrictions. But she does wonder what could possibly require such secrecy.
©2006 Laura Amy Schiltz (P)2007 Recorded Books
Thirty-Three Multicultural Tales to Tell
Summary
People just can't live together without telling stories. We tell stories that are funny, ironic, insightful, or just simply pleasing to the tongue and ear. Stories just seem to happen. When a story happens with the force of universality, it finds its way into that pantheon of tales that is the common denominator of cultural exchange. Here are 33 such tales, collected from Brazil, China, Korea, Russia, Tibet, Africa, from America's native peoples, and other lands, and chosen for the universality…
©1993 Pleasant L. DeSpain (P)2010 Recorded Books
Network of Deceit
Summary
After her rescue of nearly 50 kidnapped children made international headlines, Amara Alvarez gets what she's worked for: a transfer to San Antonio's Homicide Division. Reality sets in quickly, though, as her first case, the suspicious death of a teenager at a crowded local water park, brings chaos to her personal life. As the investigation moves forward, and she increases the pressure on the suspects, Amara finds herself under attack by cybercriminals. Her every move is being potentially watched online, and she's forced to resort to unconventional methods to find the killer. With few leads, she fights to keep her first murder investigation from ending up in the cold case files. Tom Threadgill is back with another riveting pause-resister featuring the detective who is willing to put everything on the line to see that justice is served and lives are protected.
©2021 Tom Threadgill (P)2021 Recorded Books Inc.
The Turquoise Ledge
Summary
Leslie Marmon Silko established herself as “the finest prose writer of her generation” (Larry McMurtry) with her debut novel Ceremony, one of the most acclaimed works of the 20th century. Of mixed Laguna Pueblo, Cherokee, Mexican, and white heritage, Silko brings a unique perspective to her powerful works. In this deeply personal and spiritual book, she combines memoirs, traditional storytelling, and ruminations on the natural world.
©2011 Leslie Marmon Silko (P)2011 Recorded Books, LLC
Afterlife
Summary
The first adult novel in almost 15 years by the internationally best-selling author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of Afterlife, has had the rug pulled out from under her. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her beloved husband, Sam, suddenly dies. And then more jolts: her bighearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep. Antonia has always sought direction in the literature she loves - lines from her favorite authors play in her head like a soundtrack - but now she finds that the world demands more of her than words. Afterlife is a compact, nimble, and sharply droll novel. Set in this political moment of tribalism and distrust, it asks: What do we owe those in crisis in our families, including - maybe especially - members of our human family? How do we live in a broken world without losing faith in one another or ourselves? And how do we stay true to those glorious souls we have lost?
©2020 Julia Alvarez (P)2020 Recorded Books
Dying for Daddy
Summary
From the best-selling author of The Search for the Green River Killer: the account of the family tragedy that became one of California’s most shocking murder cases. On a picturesque street in Sacramento County, California, three healthy saplings stand side by side. But what they symbolize are the deaths of three innocent people - two of them children. The man who took their lives, then planted trees in their honor, was their own husband and father. Hearts went out to Jack Barron when his wife, Irene, died mysteriously in her sleep. Soon after, his two young children were also found dead in their beds. Barron claimed they suffered from the same rare genetic disorder as their mother. But when his 52-year-old mother died, also of asphyxiation in her sleep, law enforcement officials finally took action: The fatal pattern was impossible to ignore. Was this “devoted” father really a heartless murderer? Did he suffer from a bizarre syndrome known as Munchausen by proxy, whereby a parent kills a child to gain sympathy? With firsthand interviews and exclusive inside information, author Carlton Smith paints a chilling portrait of a man driven to commit the most unspeakable of acts.
©1998 Carlton Smith (P)2019 Audible, Inc.