Current Suggestions

Fiction:

One of the surprise hits of this year has been L.A. Meyer’s “Bloody Jack Adventure” series performed by the extraordinary Katherine Kellgren. Now consisting of four historical novels, with a fifth on the way, you will not want to miss any of them!

The first, Audi Award-winning “Bloody Jack” recounts the adventures of young Jacky Faber, an adolescent girl serving as a ship’s boy aboard the HMS Dolphin, a fighting ship of 18th Century Britain’s Royal Navy, fighting all the while to keep her sex a secret.

The second, “The Curse of the Blue Tattoo,” which also won several Audi Awards at this year’s Audio Publishers Association Awards Dinner relates what happens when Jacky is forced out of the Navy when her status as a teen age girl is discovered. Thanks to her friends and superiors aboard the ship Jacky heads off to the elite Lawson Peabody School for Young Girls in Boston where she is expected to learn how to become a “LADY”. Predictably, things don’t work out at the school quite the way they had been planned and…

In ”Under the Jolly Roger” we next find Jacky back at sea on a whaling ship and headed for a another series of nautical adventures with the Royal Navy during which she takes command of a warship and gets branded as a Pirate with a price on her head. With the King of England now determined to capture and punish her, Jacky seeks a safe hiding place until things blow over.

In ”In the Belly of the Bloodhounds”, she returns to the Lawson Peabody School for Young Girls, .but trouble follows her there too. She and her classmates from Peabody are captured and, forced into the hold of the ship “Bloodhound “bound for the Barbary Coast. If they get there they are to be sold at auction into in the slave trade.

Aside from an interesting plot with lots of adventures and sub adventures the Bloody Jack series is welded into what one listener described as a grand and thrilling adventure made vivid by the marvelous narration provided by Ms. Kellgren, a veteran actress, who has performed on the stages of London, Frankfort and New York and is a graduate of The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. This is, indeed, a sit–in-the-driveway, can’t turn it off listening experience,

Non-fiction:

An interesting non-fiction offering this season is “Champlain’s Dream” by David Hackett Fischer, read by the notable and unusually effective Edward Herrmann.

Here, in the publisher’s words, is a sweeping, enthralling, biography of Samuel de Champlain ,as dramatic and exciting as the life it portrays. Champlain, of course, is known to many as the French explorer who opened up much of North America.[including what are now six Canadian Provinces and five American states] to European settlers but who was much, much more. Soldier, spy, master mariner, cartographer and artist, Champlain became the ultimate peacemaker in the New World. You won’t want to miss this one.

Other titles worth a listen are:

The Heretic’s Daughter, a new historical novel about 17th and 18th Century New England, written by Kathleen Kent and read by Mare Winningham.

Dewey, the charming story of the small town Library Cat who touched the world. Written by Vicki Myron, with Bret Witter, and read by Suzanne Toren, it recounts the life of Dewey Readmore Books, a weeks-old kitten stuffed into the returned book slot of the Spencer [Iowa] Public Library on the coldest night of the year as he won the hearts and minds of people all over the city, the state and, as his fame grew, people all over the world. How many lives can a cat affect? You decide after listening to this delightful book.

The Lace Reader, an unusual novel about small town life in Massachusetts and a group of women who can tell the future in the patterns of Lace. Written by Brunonia Barry, a native of New England who now lives in the town she writes about and read by Alyssa Bresnahan. The Lace Reader is a mesmerizing yarn about people and secrets, lies and half truths that make it difficult to tell what is real and what is not. Good characters and very good writing.

In the non-fiction world a couple of titles you won’t want to miss:

The Way of the World, by the Pulitzer Prize winning Ron Suskind, and effectively read by veteran performer Alan Sklar. This is, as the publisher says, “a startling look at how America lost its way” in the post 9/11 world and how the country now is struggling “reclaim its moral authority.” . This is not an easy read but it is an important and original one for anyone struggling to understand.;

Descent into Chaos, by Ahmed Rashid, author of the NY Times best seller TALIBAN, and read by Arthur Morey three-time winner of the AudioFile Magazine Earphones Award for excellence in narration. In this book Rashid uses his unique knowledge of Central Asia and his understanding of the historical and cultural differences that divide this war-torn region to apply a degree of reason to the debate over what is to be done and how.

For more information about these and other titles, click on the images at the left and enjoy!