Frankie J. Alvarez has narrated 3 audiobooks on Listento.it by 3 authors, with an average listener rating of 3.5★ across 2 ratings. The most-rated is We the Animals.
We the Animals
Summary
An exquisite, blistering debut novel. Three brothers tear their way through childhood—smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn—he’s Puerto Rican, she’s white—and their love is a serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmakes a family many times. Life in this family is fierce and absorbing, full of chaos and heartbreak and the euphoria of belonging completely to one another. From the intense familial unity felt by a child to the profound alienation he endures as he begins to see the world, this beautiful novel reinvents the coming-of-age story in a way that is sly and punch-in-the-stomach powerful. Written in magical language with unforgettable images, this is a stunning exploration of the viscerally charged landscape of growing up, how deeply we are formed by our earliest bonds, and how we are ultimately propelled at escape velocity toward our futures.
©2011 Justin Torres (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Barbarian Nurseries
Summary
The great panoramic social novel that Los Angeles deserves—a 21st-century, West Coast Bonfire of the Vanities by the only writer qualified to capture the city in all its glory and complexity. With The Barbarian Nurseries, Héctor Tobar gives our most misunderstood metropolis its great contemporary novel, taking us beyond the glimmer of Hollywood and deeper than camera-ready crime stories to reveal Southern California life as it really is, across its vast, sunshiny sprawl of classes, languages, dreams, and ambitions. Araceli is the live-in maid in the Torres-Thompson household—one of three Mexican employees in a Spanish-style house with lovely views of the Pacific. She has been responsible strictly for the cooking and cleaning, but the recession has hit, and suddenly Araceli is the last Mexican standing—unless you count Scott Torres, though you’d never suspect he was half Mexican but for his last name and an old family photo with central LA in the background. The financial pressure is causing the kind of fights that even Araceli knows the children shouldn’t hear, and then one morning, after a particularly dramatic fight, Araceli wakes to an empty house—except for the two Torres-Thompson boys, little aliens she’s never had to interact with before. Their parents are unreachable, and the only family member she knows of is Señor Torres, the subject of that old family photo. So she does the only thing she can think of and heads to the bus stop to seek out their grandfather. It will be an adventure, she tells the boys. If she only knew. With a precise eye for the telling detail and an unerring way with character, soaring brilliantly and seamlessly among a panorama of viewpoints, Tobar calls on all of his experience—as a novelist, a father, a journalist, a son of Guatemalan immigrants, and a native Angeleno—to deliver a novel as broad, as essential, as alive as the city itself.
©2011 Héctor Tobar (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Triple Crossing
Summary
A gritty, fast-paced thriller about the criminal underworld at work along both sides of the US-Mexico border and a young cop who goes undercover to bring it down. Valentine Pescatore, a volatile rookie Border Patrol agent, is trying to survive the trenches of the Line in San Diego. He gets in trouble and finds himself recruited as an informant by Isabel Puente, a beautiful US agent investigating a powerful Mexican crime family. As he infiltrates the Mafia, Pescatore falls in love with Puente, but he clashes with her ally, Leo Méndez, chief of a Tijuana anticorruption unit. Politically charged violence escalates, plunging Pescatore into the lawless “triple border” region of South America and a showdown full of bloodshed and betrayal. Writing with rapid-fire intensity, Sebastian Rotella captures the despair and intrigue of the borderlands, where enforcing the law has become an act of subversion. Triple Crossing is an explosive and riveting debut.
©2011 Sebastian Rotella (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc.