Jo Ann Beard has narrated 3 audiobooks on Listento.it by 2 authors, with an average listener rating of 1★ across 2 ratings. The most-rated is The Middlesteins.
The Middlesteins
Summary
For more than 30 years, Edie and Richard Middlestein shared a solid family life together in the suburbs of Chicago. But now things are splintering apart, for one reason, it seems: Edie's enormous girth. She's obsessed with food - thinking about it, eating it - and if she doesn't stop, she won't have much longer to live. When Richard abandons his wife, it is up to the next generation to take control. Robin, their schoolteacher daughter, is determined that her father pay for leaving Edie. Benny, an easy-going, pot-smoking family man, just wants to smooth things over. And Rachelle - a whippet thin perfectionist - is intent on saving her mother-in-law's life, but this task proves even bigger than planning her twin children's spectacular b'nai mitzvah party. Through it all, they wonder: do Edie's devastating choices rest on her shoulders alone? Or are others at fault, too? With pitch-perfect prose, huge compassion, and sly humor, Jami Attenberg has given us an epic story of marriage, family, and obsession. The Middlesteins explores the hopes and heartbreaks of new and old love, the yearnings of Midwestern America, and our devastating, fascinating preoccupation with food.
©2012 Jami Attenberg (P)2012 Hachette Audio
In Zanesville
Summary
The 14-year-old narrator of In Zanesville is a late bloomer. She flies under the radar - a sidekick, a marching-band dropout, a disastrous babysitter, the kind of girl whose eureka moment is the discovery that "fudge" can't be said with an English accent. Luckily, she has a best friend with whom she shares the everyday adventures of a 1970s American girlhood, incidents through which a world is revealed and character is forged. In time, their friendship is tested - by their families' claims on them, by a clique of popular girls who stumble upon them, and by the first startling, subversive intimations of womanhood. With dry wit and piercing observation, Jo Ann Beard shows us that in the seemingly quiet streets of America's innumerable Zanesvilles is a world of wonders and that within the souls of the overlooked often burns something radiant.
©2011 Jo Ann Beard (P)2018 Hachette Audio
The Boys of My Youth
Summary
Rarely does the debut of a new writer garner such attention and acclaim. The excitement began the moment "The Fourth State of Matter", one of the 14 extraordinary personal narratives in this book, appeared in the pages of The New Yorker. It increased when the author received a prestigious Whiting Foundation Award in November 1997, and it continued as the hardcover edition of The Boys of My Youth sold out its first printing even before publication. The author writes with perfect pitch as she takes us through one woman's life - from childhood to marriage and beyond - and memorably captures the collision of youthful longing and the hard intransigencies of time and fate.
©2016 Jo Ann Beard (P)2016 Hachette Audio