Jenna Lamia has narrated 39 audiobooks on Listento.it by 35 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 1,124 ratings. The most-rated is The Help.
This Dark Road to Mercy
Summary
Hailed as "mesmerizing" (New York Times Book Review) and "as if Cormac McCarthy decided to rewrite Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird" (Richmond Times-Dispatch), A Land More Kind Than Home made Wiley Cash an instant literary sensation. His resonant new novel, This Dark Road to Mercy, is a tale of love and atonement, blood and vengeance, a story that involves two young sisters, a wayward father, and an enemy determined to see him pay for his sins. When their mother dies unexpectedly, twelve-year-old Easter Quillby and her six-year-old sister, Ruby, are shuffled into the foster care system in Gastonia, North Carolina, a little town not far from the Appalachian Mountains. But just as they settle into their new life, their errant father, Wade, an ex-minor-league baseball player whom they haven't seen in years, suddenly reappears and steals them away in the middle of the night. Brady Weller, the girls' court-appointed guardian, begins looking for Wade, and quickly turns up unsettling information linking him to a multimillion-dollar robbery. But Brady isn't the only one hunting him. Also on the trail is Robert Pruitt, a mercurial man nursing a years-old vendetta, a man determined to find Wade and claim what he believes he is owed. The combination of Cash's evocative and intimate Southern voice and those of the alternating narrators, Easter, Brady, and Pruitt, brings this soulful story vividly to life. At once captivating and heartbreaking, This Dark Road to Mercy is a testament to the unbreakable bonds of family and the primal desire to outrun a past that refuses to let go.
©2014 Wiley Cash (P)2014 HarperCollinsPublishers
The Boy at the Door
Summary
Set against a stunning Scandinavian backdrop, a gritty novel of psychological suspense that asks the question how far would you go to hold onto what you have? Cecilia Wilborg has it all - a loving husband, two beautiful daughters and a gorgeous home in the affluent Norwegian town of Sandefjord. And she works hard to keep it all together. Too hard. Because one mistake from her past could bring it all crashing down around her. Annika Lucasson lives a dark life with her abusive, drug-dealing boyfriend. She's lost everything one too many times and now she's got one last chance to save herself, thanks to Cecilia. Annika knows her secret - and just how much she's willing to do to make it all go away... When someone forgets to pick up their little boy at the local pool, Cecilia agrees to take him home, only to find an abandoned, empty house. It's the first step in the unraveling of her meticulously crafted life, as her and Annika's worlds collide...
©2018 Alex Dahl (P)2018 Penguin Audio
Raymie Nightingale
Summary
Two-time Newbery Medalist Kate DiCamillo returns to her roots with a moving, masterful story of an unforgettable summer friendship. Raymie Clarke has come to realize that everything, absolutely everything, depends on her. And she has a plan. If Raymie can win the Little Miss Central Florida Tire competition, then her father, who left town two days ago with a dental hygienist, will see Raymie's picture in the paper and (maybe) come home. To win, not only does Raymie have to do good deeds and learn how to twirl a baton; she also has to contend with the wispy, frequently fainting Louisiana Elefante, who has a show-business background, and the fiery, stubborn Beverly Tapinski, who's determined to sabotage the contest. But as the competition approaches, loneliness, loss, and unanswerable questions draw the three girls into an unlikely friendship - and challenge each of them to come to the rescue in unexpected ways.
©2016 Kate DiCamillo (P)2016 Listening Library
The Adoration of Jenna Fox
Summary
Who is Jenna Fox? Seventeen-year-old Jenna has been told that is her name. She has just awoken from a coma, they tell her, and she is still recovering from a terrible accident in which she was involved a year ago. But what happened before that? Jenna doesn't remember her life. Or does she? And are the memories really hers?
©2008 Mary E. Pearson (P)2008 Macmillan Audio
The Line Tender
Summary
Funny, poignant, and deeply moving, The Line Tender is a story of nature's enduring mystery and a girl determined to find meaning and connection within it. Wherever the sharks led, Lucy Everhart's marine-biologist mother was sure to follow. In fact, she was on a boat far off the coast of Massachusetts, collecting shark data when she died suddenly. Lucy was seven. Since then Lucy and her father have kept their heads above water - thanks in large part to a few close friends and neighbors. But June of her 12th summer brings more than the end of school and a heat wave to sleepy Rockport. On one steamy day, the tide brings a great white - and then another tragedy, cutting short a friendship everyone insists was "meaningful" but no one can tell Lucy what it all meant. To survive the fresh wave of grief, Lucy must grab the line that connects her depressed father, a stubborn fisherman, and a curious old widower to her mother's unfinished research on the Great White's return to Cape Cod. If Lucy can find a way to help this unlikely quartet follow the sharks her mother loved, she'll finally be able to look beyond what she's lost and toward what's left to be discovered. "Confidently voiced." (Kirkus Reviews, starred) "A hopeful path forward." (Booklist, starred) "Big-hearted." (Bookpage, starred)
©2019 Kate Allen (P)2019 Listening Library
Incantation
Summary
Estrella deMadrigal thought she knew herself: daughter, granddaughter, sister, dearest friend, beloved. She is Star in the Night Sky, Truth in the Darkness. But truth is rare and precious in this cruel and unforgiving century in Spain, when Jews who refused conversion to Christianity risked everything - love, life, family, faith. Then: A startling discovery shakes Estrella's world to the core. And yet, it is something small and sweet that sets it aflame. A kiss. A kiss from someone she is forbidden to love. As a new girl emerges from the cocoon of secrets in which she has been shrouded, passion burns and friendship crumbles - and betrayal unleashes a monstrous evil from the very deepest part of the earth. Estrella crosses over to a place she never thought she could go; she becomes someone she never could have imagined. Remember the story she is about to tell you.
©2006 Alice Hoffman (P)2006 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Black Ice
Summary
Brit Pheiffer has trained to backpack the Teton Range, but she isn’t prepared when her ex-boyfriend, who still haunts her every thought, wants to join her. Before Britt can explore her feelings for Calvin, an unexpected blizzard forces her to seek shelter in a remote cabin, accepting the hospitality of its two very handsome occupants - but these men are fugitives, and they take her hostage. Britt is forced to guide the men off the mountain, and knows she must stay alive long enough for Calvin to find her. The task is made even more complicated when Britt finds chilling evidence of a series of murders that have taken place there - and in uncovering this, she may become the killer’s next target. But nothing is as it seems, and everyone is keeping secrets, including Mason, one of her kidnappers. His kindness is confusing Britt. Is he an enemy? Or an ally? Black Ice is New York Times best-selling author Becca Fitzpatrick's riveting romantic thriller set against the treacherous backdrop of the mountains of Wyoming. Falling in love should never be this dangerous….
©2014 Becca Fitzpatrick. All rights reserved.; 2014 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
Mary Modern
Summary
A modern, heartwarming twist on Mary Shelley's classic, this compelling debut novel weaves an old-fashioned love story with modern science and leaves us wanting more. Lucy Morrigan, a young genetic researcher, lives with her boyfriend, Gray, in her crumbling family mansion. Surrounded by four generations of clothes, photographs, furniture, and other remnants of past lives, they are strangely out of touch with the modern world - except in the basement, where Lucy works in the high-tech lab she inherited from her father. Frustrated by her unsuccessful attempts to win tenure and bear a child, she takes drastic measures to achieve both: she uses a bloodstained scrap of apron found in the attic to successfully clone her grandmother. Naturally, Lucy is hoping for a baby. Instead, she brings to life 22-year-old Mary. Alive in a home that is no longer her own, amid reminders of a life she has lived but doesn't remember, Mary is trapped in the strangest sort of déjà vu, and Lucy must face the truth about love, longing, and the ties that bind.
©2007 Camille Marjorie DeAngelis (P)2007 HighBridge Company
Accidents of Nature
Summary
Seventeen-year-old Jean has cerebral palsy and gets around in a wheelchair, but she’s always believed she’s just the same as everyone else. She goes to normal school and has normal friends. She’s never really known another disabled person before she arrives at Camp Courage. But there Jean meets Sara, who welcomes her to “Crip Camp” and nicknames her Spazzo. Sara has radical theories about how people fit into society. She’s full of rage and revolution against pitying insults and the lack of respect for people with disabilities. As Jean joins a community unlike any she has ever imagined, she comes to question her old beliefs and look at the world in a new light. The camp session is only 10 days long, but that may be all it takes to change a life forever.
©2006 Harriet McBryde Johnson (P)2006 Random House, Inc. Listening Library, an imprint of the Random House Audio Publishing Group
Tunneling to the Center of the Earth
Summary
A debut short story collection in the tradition of writers like Kelly Link, Aimee Bender, and George Saunders - strange, imaginative, and refreshingly original - now on audio as part of Ecco’s Art of the Story Series, and with a new introduction from the author. Kevin Wilson’s characters inhabit a world that moves seamlessly between the real and the imagined, the mundane and the fantastic. “Grand Stand-In” is narrated by an employee of the Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider - a company that supplies “stand-ins” for families with deceased, ill, or just plain mean grandparents. And in “Blowing Up on the Spot”, a story singled out by Ann Patchett for Ploughshares, a young woman works sorting tiles at a Scrabble factory after her parents have spontaneously combusted. Southern gothic at its best, laced with humor and pathos, these wonderfully inventive stories explore the relationship between loss and death and the many ways we try to cope with both.
©2009 Kevin Wilson (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers
A Long Line of Cakes
Summary
Two-time National Book Award finalist Deborah Wiles introduces us to the Cakes, a family of traveling bakers, who've just arrived in Wiles's legendary Aurora County, Mississippi. Emma Lane Cake has five brothers, four dogs, and a family that can't stay put. The Cake family travels from place to place, setting up bakeries in communities that need them. Then, just when Emma feels settled in with new friends... they move again. Now the Cakes have come to Aurora County, and Emma has vowed that this time she is NOT going to get attached to ANYONE or ANYTHING. Why bother, if her father's only going to uproot her again? But fate has different plans. And so does Ruby Lavender, who is going to show Emma Lane Cake a thing or two about making friendship last.
©2018 Deborah Wiles (P)2018 Listening Library
Bat 6
Summary
In a powerful book set in post-World War II Oregon, sixth graders from rival towns prepare for the 50th annual softball game. Two of the players - a Japanese American who spent the war in an internment camp and a girl whose father was killed at Pearl Harbor - collide with tragic results on the day of the big game.
©2000 Virginia Euwer Wolff (P)2009 Listening Library
Hope Was Here
Summary
Hope's used to thinking on her feet - she hasn't become a terrific waitress by accident. But when she and her aunt Addie move from New York City to a small town in Wisconsin to run the Welcome Stairways Diner, she isn't sure she'll fit in. Luckily, she doesn't have much time to dwell on it, what with life at the diner and her new home's upcoming election. G. T., the owner of Welcome Stairways, has decided to run for mayor, and no one in town knows what to think. After all, G. T. has leukemia. And his opponent is the current mayor, who hasn't lost an election yet. Some think G. T. is crazy, but Hope sees the goodness and power in him. Will everyone else see it too?
©2003 Joan Bauer (P)2008 Random House, Inc.
Icefall
Summary
Solveig, a princess, is trapped in a hidden fortress with her siblings. As they wait for the winter and the unending ice to break, acts of treachery soon make it clear that a traitor lurks in their midst. Can Solveig, her siblings, and her best friend Mark survive the long winter months and expose the traitor before he (or she) succeeds in destroying the king, his empire, and his children?
©2011 Matthew J. Kirby (P)2011 Scholastic Audio
Sunflower Sisters
Summary
Martha Hall Kelly’s million-copy best seller Lilac Girls introduced listeners to Caroline Ferriday. Now, in Sunflower Sisters, Kelly tells the story of Ferriday’s ancestor Georgeanna Woolsey, a Union nurse during the Civil War whose calling leads her to cross paths with Jemma, a young enslaved girl who is sold off and conscripted into the army, and Anne-May Wilson, a Southern plantation mistress whose husband enlists. “An exquisite tapestry of women determined to defy the molds the world has for them.” (Lisa Wingate, number-one New York Times best-selling author of Before We Were Yours) Georgeanna “Georgey” Woolsey isn’t meant for the world of lavish parties and the demure attitudes of women of her stature. So when war ignites the nation, Georgey follows her passion for nursing during a time when doctors considered women on the battlefront a bother. In proving them wrong, she and her sister Eliza venture from New York to Washington, DC, to Gettysburg and witness the unparalleled horrors of slavery as they become involved in the war effort. In the South, Jemma is enslaved on the Peeler Plantation in Maryland, where she lives with her mother and father. Her sister, Patience, is enslaved on the plantation next door, and both live in fear of LeBaron, an abusive overseer who tracks their every move. When Jemma is sold by the cruel plantation mistress Anne-May at the same time the Union army comes through, she sees a chance to finally escape - but only by abandoning the family she loves. Anne-May is left behind to run Peeler Plantation when her husband joins the Union army and her cherished brother enlists with the Confederates. In charge of the household, she uses the opportunity to follow her own ambitions and is drawn into a secret Southern network of spies, finally exposing herself to the fate she deserves. Inspired by true accounts, Sunflower Sisters provides a vivid, detailed look at the Civil War experience, from the barbaric and inhumane plantations, to a war-torn New York City, to the horrors of the battlefield. It’s a sweeping story of women caught in a country on the brink of collapse, in a society grappling with nationalism and unthinkable racial cruelty, a story still so relevant today.
©2021 Martha Hall Kelly (P)2021 Random House Audio
Because of Winn-Dixie
Summary
The classic heartwarming tale from Kate DiCamillo - now with an afterword from the beloved author, reflecting on 20 years in print One summer's day, 10-year-old India Opal Buloni goes down to the local supermarket for some groceries - and comes home with a dog. But Winn-Dixie is no ordinary dog. It's because of Winn-Dixie that Opal begins to make friends. And it's because of Winn-Dixie that she finally dares to ask her father about her mother, who left when Opal was three. In fact, as Opal admits, just about everything that happens that summer is because of Winn-Dixie. This updated edition of Kate DiCamillo's classic novel invites listeners to make themselves at home - whether they're experiencing the book for the first time or returning to an old favorite.
©2000 Kate DiCamillo (P)2021 Listening Library
The View from Saturday
Summary
Did Mrs. Olinsky choose the four members of the sixth grade Academic Bowl Team, or did they choose her--and one another? Four stories-within-in-a-story, interspersed with the ongoing narrative of the team's triumphant march to the state championship, introduce each member of the team in his own her own voice, and bring the dynamics of the group into focus.
©1998 E. L. Konigsburg (P)2009 Simon & Schuster
Starfish
Summary
Ellie is tired of being fat-shamed and does something about it in this poignant debut novel-in-verse. Ever since Ellie wore a whale swimsuit and made a big splash at her fifth birthday party, she's been bullied about her weight. To cope, she tries to live by the Fat Girl Rules - like "no making waves", "avoid eating in public", and "don't move so fast that your body jiggles". And she's found her safe space - her swimming pool - where she feels weightless in a fat-obsessed world. In the water, she can stretch herself out like a starfish and take up all the room she wants. It's also where she can get away from her pushy mom, who thinks criticizing Ellie's weight will motivate her to diet. Fortunately, Ellie has allies in her dad, her therapist, and her new neighbor, Catalina, who loves Ellie for who she is. With this support buoying her, Ellie might finally be able to cast aside the Fat Girl Rules and starfish in real life - by unapologetically being her own fabulous self.
©2021 Lisa Fipps (P)2021 Listening Library
Hey, Kiddo
Summary
Winner of both the American Library Association’s 2020 Odyssey Award for Excellence in Audiobook Production and the 2020 Audie Award for Young Adult! The powerful, unforgettable memoir from Jarrett Krosoczka, about growing up with a drug-addicted mother, a missing father, and two unforgettably opinionated grandparents. In kindergarten, Jarrett Krosoczka's teacher asks him to draw his family, with a mommy and a daddy. But Jarrett's family is much more complicated than that. His mom is an addict, in and out of rehab, and in and out of Jarrett's life. His father is a mystery - Jarrett doesn't know where to find him, or even what his name is. Jarrett lives with his grandparents - two very loud, very loving, very opinionated people who had thought they were through with raising children until Jarrett came along. Jarrett goes through his childhood trying to make his non-normal life as normal as possible, finding a way to express himself through drawing even as so little is being said to him about what's going on. Only as a teenager can Jarrett begin to piece together the truth of his family, reckoning with his mother and tracking down his father. Hey, Kiddo is a profoundly important memoir about growing up in a family grappling with addiction and finding the art that helps you survive.
©2019 by Jarrett J. Krosoczka (P)2019 Scholastic Inc.