Roxana Ortega has narrated 9 audiobooks on Listento.it by 8 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.3★ across 47 ratings. The most-rated is Like a Mother.
Like a Mother
Summary
What to listen to after What to Expect.... A badass, feminist, and personal deep-dive into the science and culture of pregnancy and early motherhood that debunks myths and dated assumptions, offering guidance and camaraderie to women navigating one of the biggest and most profound changes in their lives. Like most first-time mothers, Angela Garbes was filled with questions when she became pregnant. What exactly is a placenta? How does a body go into labor? Why is breast best? What are the signs and effects of postpartum depression? But as she discovered, it’s not easy to find satisfying answers. Your OB will cautiously quote statistics; online sources will scare you with conflicting and often inaccurate information; and even the most trusted books will offer information with a heavy dose of judgment. To educate herself, the food and culture writer embarked on an intensive journey of exploration, diving into the scientific mysteries and cultural myths that surround motherhood to find answers to her questions that had only previously been given through a lens of what women ought to do - instead of allowing them the freedom to choose the right path themselves. In Like a Mother, Angela offers a rigorously researched and compelling look at the physiology, biology, chemistry, and psychology of pregnancy and motherhood, informed by research, reportage, and her own experience. With a journalist’s curiosity and discipline, a mother’s urgency, and a food writer’s insatiability, she explores the science behind the pressing questions women have about a number of subjects, including postpartum hormones, breast milk, and miscarriage. Infused with candor and humor, born out of awe, appreciation, and understanding of the human body and its workings, Like a Mother is a full-frontal look at what’s really happening underneath your skin (and to it) and why women need to know.
©2018 Angela Garbes (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers
A Visit from the Goon Squad
Summary
Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, the listener does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa. We first meet Sasha in her mid-30s, on her therapist’s couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We plunge into the hidden yearnings and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian stuck in a dead marriage, who travels to Naples to extract Sasha from the city’s demimonde and experiences an epiphany of his own while staring at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nazionale. We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life - divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed-up band in the basement of a suburban house - and then revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youth, shy and tender, reveling in San Francisco’s punk scene as he discovers his ardor for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what became of his high school gang - who thrived and who faltered - and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie’s catastrophically careless mentor, along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou’s far-flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall. A Visit from the Goon Squad is an audiobook about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both - and escape the merciless progress of time - in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.
©2010 Jennifer Egan (P)2019 Random House Audio
Random Family
Summary
This New York Times best-seller intimately depicts urban life in a gripping book that slips behind cold statistics and sensationalism to reveal the true sagas lurking behind the headlines of gangsta glamour. In her extraordinary best seller, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc immerses listeners in the intricacies of the ghetto, revealing the true sagas lurking behind the headlines of gangsta glamour, gold-drenched drug dealers, and street-corner society. Focusing on two romances - Jessica's dizzying infatuation with a hugely successful young heroin dealer, Boy George; and Coco's first love with Jessica's little brother, Cesar - Random Family is the story of young people trying to outrun their destinies. Jessica and Boy George ride the wild adventure between riches and ruin while Coco and Cesar stick closer to the street, all four caught in a precarious dance between survival and death. Friends get murdered; the DEA and FBI investigate Boy George; Cesar becomes a fugitive; Jessica and Coco endure homelessness, betrayal, the heartbreaking separation of prison, and, throughout it all, the insidious damage of poverty. Charting the tumultuous cycle of the generations - as girls become mothers, boys become criminals, and hope struggles against deprivation - LeBlanc slips behind the cold statistics and sensationalism and comes back with a riveting, haunting, and true story.
©2016 Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (P)2016 Random House Audio
American Like Me
Summary
From award-winning actress and political activist America Ferrera comes a vibrant and varied collection of first person accounts from prominent figures about the experience of growing up between cultures. America Ferrera has always felt wholly American, and yet, her identity is inextricably linked to her parents’ homeland and Honduran culture. Speaking Spanish at home, having Saturday morning salsa-dance parties in the kitchen, and eating tamales alongside apple pie at Christmas never seemed at odds with her American identity. Still, she yearned to see that identity reflected in the larger American narrative. Now, in American Like Me, America invites 31 of her friends, peers, and heroes to share their stories about life between cultures. We know them as actors, comedians, athletes, politicians, artists, and writers. However, they are also immigrants, children or grandchildren of immigrants, indigenous people, or people who otherwise grew up with deep and personal connections to more than one culture. Each of them struggled to establish a sense of self, find belonging, and feel seen. And they call themselves American enthusiastically, reluctantly, or not at all. Ranging from the heartfelt to the hilarious, their stories shine a light on a quintessentially American experience and will appeal to anyone with a complicated relationship to family, culture, and growing up. Full cast of narrators includes: America Ferrera, Bambadjan Bamba, Joy Cho, Auli'I Cravalho, Tim Chiou, Janina Edwards, Jennifer Ikeda, Lameece Issaq, Eugene Kim, Jennifer Lim, Sunil Malhotra, Ramón De Ocampo, Roxana Ortega, Geena Rocero, Martin Sensmeier, Heather Alicia Simms, Neela Vaswani, and Tanaya Winder.
©2018 America Ferrera (P)2018 Simon & Schuster Audio
Lola
Summary
Winner of the John Creasey Debut Dagger Award. Nominated for the Edgar Award for best first novel. An astonishing debut crime thriller about an unforgettable woman who combines the genius and ferocity of Lisbeth Salander with the ruthless ambition of Walter White The Crenshaw Six are a small but up-and-coming gang in South Central LA who have recently been drawn into an escalating war between rival drug cartels. To outsiders, the Crenshaw Six appear to be led by a man named Garcia...but what no one has figured out is that the gang's real leader (and secret weapon) is Garcia's girlfriend, a brilliant young woman named Lola. Lola has mastered playing the role of submissive girlfriend, and in the man's world she inhabits she is consistently underestimated. But in truth she is much, much smarter - and in many ways tougher and more ruthless - than any of the men around her, and as the gang is increasingly sucked into a world of high-stakes betrayal and brutal violence, her skills and leadership become their only hope of survival. Lola marks the debut of a hugely exciting new thriller writer and of a singular, magnificent character unlike anyone else in fiction.
©2017 Melissa Scrivner Love (P)2017 Random House Audio
Disappeared
Summary
You've never listened to a Francisco X. Stork novel like this before! A missing girl, a determined reporter, and a young man on the brink combine for a powerful story of choices, suspense, and survival. Four months ago... Sara Zapata's best friend disappeared, kidnapped by the web of criminals who terrorize Juarez. Four hours ago... Sara received a death threat - and, with it, a clue to the place where her friend is locked away. Four weeks ago... Emiliano Zapata fell in love with Perla Rubi, who will never be his so long as he's poor. Four minutes ago... Emiliano got the chance to make more money than he ever dreamed - just by joining the web. In the next four days, Sara and Emiliano will each face impossible choices, between life and justice, friends and family, truth and love. But when the web closes in on Sara, only one path remains for the siblings: the way across the desert to the United States.
©2017 Francisco X. Stork (P)2017 Scholastic, Inc.
No Justice in the Shadows
Summary
A provocative account of the long, racist history of our immigration system, revealing how it has become the brutal machine that today upends the lives of millions of immigrants Each year in the United States, hundreds of thousands of people are arrested, imprisoned, and deported, trapped in what leading immigrant rights activist and lawyer Alina Das calls the "deportation machine". The bulk of the arrests target people who have a criminal record - so-called "criminal aliens" - the majority of whose offenses are immigration-, drug-, or traffic-related. These individuals are uprooted from their homes, their families, and their communities, and banished. Through the stories of those caught in the system, Das traces the ugly history of immigration policy to explain how the US constructed the idea of the "criminal alien", effectively dividing immigrants into the categories "good" and "bad", "deserving" and "undeserving". As Das argues, we need to confront the cruelty of the machine so that we can build an inclusive immigration policy premised on human dignity and break the cycle once and for all.
©2020 Alina Das (P)2020 Bold Type Books
Illegal
Summary
Emiliano and Sara made it across the border. Now, they need to survive in America. Emiliano and his sister Sara have successfully fled organized crime in Mexico, illegally crossing into the United States. But now, Sara is in jail, and Emiliano's reunion with their father in Chicago is more awkward than celebratory. When Emiliano is falsely accused of a crime against a missing local girl, it sets off a tense and dangerous race to find her, before he can even "find himself" in this new place he must call home.
©2020 Scholastic (P)2020 Scholastic Inc
American Heroin
Summary
The unforgettable protagonist of Lola returns in a gritty, high-octane thriller about a brilliant woman who will stop at nothing to protect her growing drug empire, even if she has to go to war with a rival cartel...or her own family. It took sacrifice, pain, and more than a few dead bodies, but Lola has clawed her way to the top of her South Central Los Angeles neighborhood. Her gang has grown beyond a few trusted soldiers into a full-fledged empire, and the influx of cash has opened up a world she has never known - one where her daughter can attend a good school, where her mother can live in safety, and where Lola can finally dream of a better life. But with great opportunity comes great risk, and as Lola ascends the hierarchy of the city's underworld, she attracts the attention of a dangerous new cartel that sees her as its greatest obstacle to dominance. Soon, Lola finds herself sucked into a deadly all-out drug war that threatens to destroy everything she's built. But even as Lola readies to go to war, she learns the greatest threat may not be a rival drug lord but a danger far closer to home: her own brother. Edgy, complex, and breathtakingly propulsive, Melissa Scrivner Love has crafted a novel sure to please not only those who loved her first book, but everyone who enjoys a gripping thriller.
©2019 Melissa Scrivner Love (P)2019 Random House Audio