Audiobook Awesomeness AND Oregon: If I Stay by Gayle Forman

Yeah I know. I skipped like 10-15 states in there and went from Michigan to Oregon, but seriously who’s counting or cares. I will get to those states no problem. In case you don’t know what I am referencing, I am talking about my reading challenge.

Via GoodReads. Choices. Seventeen-year-old Mia is faced with some tough ones: Stay true to her first love—music—even if it means losing her boyfriend and leaving her family and friends behind? 

Then one February morning Mia goes for a drive with her family, and in an instant, everything changes. Suddenly, all the choices are gone, except one. And it's the only one that matters.

If I Stay is a heartachingly beautiful book about the power of love, the true meaning of family, and the choices we all make. 

(SPOILERS BE AHEAD MATEYS)This audiobook was really good, like The Fault in Our Stars good. I teared up at the end.

We are introduced to a teenager, Mia, who is in some sort of limbo after a horrific car crash that has killed both her parents and her younger brother Teddy. She is grappling with her choice to join them in “afterlife” or to stay and continue her own life.

The narrative is told throughout a 24-hour period of the car crash up to the point when Mia makes her decision while in limbo. Throughout we get the story of her family, her first love Adam, her best friend Kim, her struggles with the cello, and her love of classical music told in a flashback style. The stories of the past help us, the reader, understand why this choice is a tough one.

The narrator was, of course, amazing and I could feel tears welling up in her as they did with me, especially after learning Teddy had died and then again with Adam’s heartfelt speech at the very end.

Even occasionally throughout the story there was cello music in the background which was strange, but also rather nice.

I don’t know how to exactly classify this story. It’s not really a love story or a problem teen story. I guess the best description would be realistic fiction? This book is for your Fault in Our Stars fans most definitely. It should also be of note that there is a movie based on this book coming out sometime later this year so young adult librarians need to start stacking up their copies now. 

21 titles down, 29 more to go! Close to the halfway point.

Audiobook Awesomeness: Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

I am working on a few things right now. I had to finish The Selection quicker than anticipated and therefore I am still working the Memoirs of Lady Trent. I did finish this amazing audiobook just a few days ago and I wanted to write about it right away because, peeps, it is amazeballs!

Plot summary via GoodReads. I have two weeks. You’ll shoot me at the end no matter what I do.

That’s what you do to enemy agents. It’s what we do to enemy agents. But I look at all the dark and twisted roads ahead and cooperation is the easy way out. Possibly the only way out for a girl caught red-handed doing dirty work like mine — and I will do anything, anything, to avoid SS-Hauptsturmführer von Linden interrogating me again.

He has said that I can have as much paper as I need. All I have to do is cough up everything I can remember about the British War Effort. And I’m going to. But the story of how I came to be here starts with my friend Maddie. She is the pilot who flew me into France — an Allied Invasion of Two.

We are a sensational team.

This story begins with a young lady whose code name is Verity. She has been captured in Nazi-occupied France in 1943 and this is her confession to the SS Gestapo. Halfway through the story our narrators switch from Verity’s confession to her best friend Maddie who tries to rescue her from the German compound.

It is during Maddie’s story that we learn more about Verity and that she is not a reliable narrator to us, the audience. I didn’t even think about it until now that we were looking at her confession that her German captors would be reading so of course she left stuff out.

I am absolutely in love with this story!  I was hooked the entire time. I do not always enjoy historical fiction, but this was so beautifully written that even I liked it and learned something from it. As much as history is involved in the story, it is really a story about two best friends.  Their relationship makes us all think about our best friends and how we would do anything for them even if we don’t see them all the time.

The story was of course amazing, but the audiobook was beyond the best I have ever heard. The narrators felt extremely real and even left me in tears at one point (which I can’t reveal as it is a spoiler).

Not only is this book great for reluctant readers, but any high school World History teacher or literature teacher should consider this as a supplement to any lessons on World War II. The descriptions of British Air Force procedures and technology at the time extended this book to not just entertainment, but educational as well.

Again, a great example of how audiobooks can help reluctant readers become expert readers.