Kristen Sieh has narrated 29 audiobooks on Listento.it by 29 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 1,091 ratings. The most-rated is An Absolutely Remarkable Thing.
Sad Janet
Summary
Named one of the Best Books of the Summer by Lit Hub, The Millions, Refinery29, and Hey Alma. “Hilarious, wise, wicked, and tender.” (Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, The New York Times best-selling author of The Nest) Janet works at a rundown dog shelter in the woods. She wears black, loves The Smiths, and can’t wait to get rid of her passive-aggressive boyfriend. Her brain is full of anxiety, like “one of those closets you never want to open because everything will fall out and crush you.” She has a meddlesome family, eccentric coworkers, one old friend who’s left her for Ibiza, and one new friend who’s really just a neighbor she sees in the hallway. Most of all, Janet has her sadness — a comfortable cloak she uses to insulate herself from the oppressions of the wider world. That is, until one fateful summer when word spreads about a new pill that offers even cynics like her a short-term taste of happiness...just long enough to make it through the holidays without wanting to stab someone with a candy cane. When her family stages an intervention, her boyfriend leaves, and the prospect of making it through Christmas alone seems like too much, Janet decides to give them what they want. What follows is life-changing for all concerned — in ways no one quite expects. Hilarious, bitterly wise, and surprisingly warm, Sad Janet is the depression comedy you never knew you needed.
©2020 Lucie Britsch (P)2020 Penguin Audio
The Explorers: The Door in the Alley
Summary
Featuring a mysterious society, a secretive past, and a pig in a teeny hat, The Explorers: The Door in the Alley is the first book in a new series for fans of The Name of This Book Is a Secret and The Mysterious Benedict Society. Knock once if you can find it - but only members are allowed inside. This is one of those stories that start with a pig in a teeny hat. It's not the one you're thinking about. (This story is way better than that one.) This pig-in-a-teeny-hat story starts when a very uninquisitive boy stumbles upon a very mysterious society. After that, there is danger and adventure; there are missing persons, hired thugs, a hidden box, a lost map, and famous explorers; and there is a girl looking for help that only uninquisitive boys can offer. The Explorers: The Door in the Alley is the first book in a series that is sure to hit young listeners right in the funny bone.
©2017 Adrienne Kress (P)2017 Listening Library
The Wicked Sister
Summary
She thought she'd buried her past. But what if it's been hunting her this whole time? From the best-selling and award-winning author of The Marsh King's Daughter comes a startling novel of psychological suspense as two generations of sisters try to unravel their tangled relationships between nature and nurture, guilt and betrayal, love and evil. You have been cut off from society for 15 years, shut away in a mental hospital in self-imposed exile as punishment for the terrible thing you did when you were a child. But what if nothing about your past is as it seems? And if you didn't accidentally shoot and kill your mother, then whoever did is still out there. Waiting for you. For a decade and a half, Rachel Cunningham has chosen to lock herself away in a psychiatric facility, tortured by gaps in her memory and the certainty that she is responsible for her parents' deaths. But when she learns new details about their murders, Rachel returns, in a quest for answers, to the place where she once felt safest: her family's sprawling log cabin in the remote forests of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. As Rachel begins to uncover what really happened on the day her parents were murdered, she learns - as her mother did years earlier - that home can be a place of unspeakable evil and that the bond she shares with her sister might be the most poisonous of all.
©2020 Karen Dionne (P)2020 Penguin Audio
The Wild
Summary
A girl is sent against her will to a remote wilderness boot camp where things aren't what they seem in this riveting and twisty thriller. From this moment on, you're a bear cub. You'll learn responsibility and respect. How to survive. It's easier if you just accept it. Dawn isn't a bad person - she's just made some bad choices: wrong guy, wrong friends, wrong everything. But she wasn't expecting her parents to pay a boatload of money to ship her off to Out of the Wild, a wilderness boot camp with a bunch of other messed up kids to learn important "life lessons". It's true that Dawn and the other cubs will learn a lot - but it's not what any of them expect. Because what happens in the woods isn't what their parents planned. Sometimes plans go very wrong. And this is one of those times. Suddenly Dawn is more scared than she's ever been in her life. And you will be too.
©2020 Owen Laukkanen (P)2020 Listening Library
Time Travel for Love and Profit
Summary
When Nephele has a terrible freshman year, she does the only logical thing for a math prodigy like herself: She invents a time travel app so she can go back and do it again (and again, and again) in this funny love story, Groundhog Day for the iPhone generation. Fourteen-year-old Nephele used to have friends. Well, she had a friend. That friend made the adjustment to high school easily, leaving Nephele behind in the process. And as Nephele looks ahead, all she can see is three very lonely years. Nephele is also a whip-smart lover of math and science, so she makes a plan. Step one: invent time travel. Step two: go back in time, have a do-over of ninth grade, crack the code on making friends, and become beloved and popular. Does it work? Sort of. Nephele does travel through time, but not the way she planned - she’s created a time loop, and she’s the only one looping. And she keeps looping, for 10 years, always alone. Now, facing ninth grade for the 10th time, Nephele knows what to expect. Or so she thinks. She didn’t anticipate that her new teacher would be a boy from her long ago ninth grade class, now a grown man; that she would finally make a new friend, after 10 years. And, she couldn’t have pictured someone like Jazz, with his deep violet eyes, goofy magic tricks and the quietly intense way he sees her. After 10 freshman years, she still has a lot more to learn. But now that she’s finally figured out how to go back, has she found something worth staying for?
©2020 Sarah Lariviere (P)2020 Listening Library
Meet Me in Paradise
Summary
Marin Cole has never: Seen the ocean Climbed a mountain Taken a risk on love ...But if her sister's plan works, she just might do all three. Ever since her journalist mother died on assignment, Marin has played it safe, refusing to set foot outside the state of Tennessee. Her wild-child younger sister, Sadie, has trotted the globe as a photographer, living off of art and adrenaline. When Sadie returns from a tough assignment abroad and looks a little worse for wear, Marin reluctantly agrees to a sisters' spa weekend on the tropical island of Saba. But her lifelong fear of travel is affirmed when Sadie misses the flight, Marin's luggage gets mixed up with another passenger's, and an episode of turbulence sends her hurtling into the lap of Lucas Tsai, the handsome stranger who stole her sister's seat. For the first time in a long time, Marin has to step outside of her comfort zone as she explores the island with Lucas and learns what she's been missing out on. With each breathtaking new experience, Marin gets closer to her real self, the man she’s falling for, and the heart-wrenching truth about why she’s there in the first place.
©2021 Libby Hubscher (P)2021 Penguin Audio
Small Magic
Summary
Escape to worlds full of adventure and magic in the first-ever Terry Brooks short-story collection, featuring both new and fan-favorite stories from all three of his major literary worlds: Shannara, Magic Kingdom, and The Word and the Void. Here are heroes fighting new battles and struggling to conquer the ghosts of the past. Here are quests both small and far reaching; heroism both intimate and vast. Here we learn of Garet Jax’s childhood, see how Allanon first located Shea Ohmsford, and follow an old wing-rider at the end of his life. Here we see Knights of the Word fighting demons within and without, and witness Ben Holiday and his daughter each trying to overcome the unique challenges that Landover offers. This collection of 11 tales is a must-have addition to the Terry Brooks canon - a delightful way to spend time with favorite characters, and a wonderful reminder of what makes a Brooks story such a timeless classic.
©2021 Terry Brooks (P)2021 Random House Audio
The Borrower
Summary
In this delightful, funny, and moving first novel, a librarian and a young boy obsessed with reading take to the road. Lucy Hull, a young children's librarian in Hannibal, Missouri, finds herself both a kidnapper and kidnapped when her favorite patron, 10-year-old Ian Drake, runs away from home. The precocious Ian is addicted to reading but needs Lucy's help to smuggle books past his overbearing mother, who has enrolled Ian in weekly antigay classes with celebrity Pastor Bob. Lucy stumbles into a moral dilemma when she finds Ian camped out in the library after hours with a knapsack of provisions and an escape plan. Desperate to save him from Pastor Bob and the Drakes, Lucy allows herself to be hijacked by Ian. The odd pair embarks on a crazy road trip from Missouri to Vermont, with ferrets, an inconvenient boyfriend, and upsetting family history thrown in their path. But is it just Ian who is running away? Who is the man who seems to be on their tail? And should Lucy be trying to save a boy from his own parents?
©2011 Rebecca Makkai (P)2020 Penguin Audio
Music for Wartime
Summary
Named a must-read/must-listen by the Chicago Tribune, O Magazine, BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and The L Magazine. Rebecca Makkai’s first two novels, The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House, have established her as one of the freshest and most imaginative voices in fiction. Now, the award-winning writer, whose stories have appeared in four consecutive editions of The Best American Short Stories, returns with a highly anticipated collection bearing her signature mix of intelligence, wit, and heart. A reality show producer manipulates two contestants into falling in love, even as her own relationship falls apart. Just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a young boy has a revelation about his father’s past when a renowned Romanian violinist plays a concert in their home. When the prized elephant of a traveling circus keels over dead, the small-town minister tasked with burying its remains comes to question his own faith. In an unnamed country, a composer records the folk songs of two women from a village on the brink of destruction. These transporting, deeply moving stories - some inspired by her own family history - amply demonstrate Makkai’s extraordinary range as a storyteller and confirm her as a master of the short-story form. “Richly imagined.” (Chicago Tribune) “Impressive.” (O, The Oprah Magazine) “Engrossing.” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) “Inventive.” (W Magazine)
©2015 Rebecca Makkai (P)2020 Penguin Audio