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The Scenic Route: A Novel
- Narrated by: Chris Fogg
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
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Publisher's summary
Divorced, alone, and unexpectedly unemployed, Sylvia Landsman flees to Italy, where she meets Henry, a wistful, married, middle-aged expatriate. Taking off on a grand tour of Europe bankrolled with his wife's money, Henry and Sylvia follow a circuitous route around the continent - as Sylvia entertains Henry with stories of her peculiar family and her damaged friends, of dead ducks and Alma Mahler. Her narrative is a tapestry of remembrances and regrets... and her secret shame: a small, cowardly sin of omission. Yet when the opportunity arises for Sylvia and Henry to do something small but brave, the refrain "if only" returns to haunt her, leaving Sylvia with one more story of love lived and lost.
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Eloquent & Honest
- By Sara on 09-30-15
By: Abigail Thomas
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Saints for All Occasions
- A Novel
- By: J. Courtney Sullivan
- Narrated by: Susan Denaker
- Length: 15 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Nora and Theresa Flynn are 21 and 17 when they leave their small village in Ireland and journey to America. Nora is the responsible sister; she's shy and serious and engaged to a man she isn't sure that she loves. Theresa is gregarious; she is thrilled by their new life in Boston and besotted with the fashionable dresses and dance halls on Dudley Street. But when Theresa ends up pregnant, Nora is forced to come up with a plan - a decision with repercussions they are both far too young to understand.
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The narration ruined it
- By Janis Reynolds on 06-12-17
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Up from Orchard Street
- By: Eleanor Widmer
- Narrated by: Lorna Raver
- Length: 15 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Three generations of Roths live together in a crowded tenement flat. Long-widowed Manya is the family's head and its heart. But Manya is no soft touch, except, perhaps, where her granddaughter Elka is concerned. Precocious Elka is her closest companion and confidante. Through Elka's eyes we come to know the fascinating characters who move in and out of the Roths' lives.
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Tenement Life From a Child's Point of View
- By Sara on 08-10-14
By: Eleanor Widmer
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The Story of Arthur Truluv
- A Novel
- By: Elizabeth Berg
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Berg
- Length: 6 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Three people find their way back from loss and loneliness to a different kind of belonging in this deeply moving novel. Arthur, an old widower struggling to overcome his grief, meets Maddy, a troubled teenage girl who avoids school by hiding out where Arthur goes every day for lunch. The two strike up a friendship that draws them out of isolation.
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Sickly Sweet
- By Amazon Customer on 01-19-18
By: Elizabeth Berg
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Magic Lessons
- A Prequel to Practical Magic
- By: Alice Hoffman
- Narrated by: Sutton Foster
- Length: 13 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Where does the story of the Owens bloodline begin? With Maria Owens, in the 1600s, when she’s abandoned in a snowy field in rural England as a baby. Under the care of Hannah Owens, Maria learns about the “Nameless Arts". Hannah recognizes that Maria has a gift and she teaches the girl all she knows. It is here that she learns her first important lesson: Always love someone who will love you back.
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Alice Hoffman Never Disappoints
- By Elle Estee on 10-07-20
By: Alice Hoffman
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One True Thing
- By: Anna Quindlen
- Narrated by: Christina Moore
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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A young woman sits in jail, accused of the mercy killing of her dying mother. She didn't do it, but she thinks she knows who did. In the last months of her life, Ellen Gulden's mother revealed startling secrets that challenged everything Ellen believed about her family. Now, in jail, Ellen believes those secrets will tell her who had the courage to end her mother's suffering.
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Quindlen's writing skills shine in One True Thing.
- By Bonny on 08-26-13
By: Anna Quindlen
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The Sheep Queen
- By: Tom Savage
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Thomas Savage, a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and a PEN/Faulkner Award nominee, has long been a critically acclaimed author. The New Yorker calls him "a writer of the first order". This starkly elegant story details the lives of Emma Russell Sweringen and her family in the early 1900s. Emma’s daughter Beth secretly gave up a baby girl for adoption many years ago. Now, Beth’s secret life is being unraveled as her daughter comes looking for her long-lost family.
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Excellent in all respects
- By Marlene J. Gustafson on 05-11-19
By: Tom Savage
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Bitter in the Mouth
- By: Monique Truong
- Narrated by: Jennifer Ikeda
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Growing up in the small town of Boiling Springs, North Carolina, in the 70’s and 80’s, Linda believes that she is profoundly different from everyone else, including the members of her own family. “What I know about you, little girl, would break you in two” are the cruel, mysterious last words that Linda’s grandmother ever says to her.
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"Tasting Words" made this hard to hear!
- By Kate Anderson on 11-06-11
By: Monique Truong
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Garden Spells
- By: Sarah Addison Allen
- Narrated by: Susan Ericksen
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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The Waverleys have always been a curious family, endowed with peculiar gifts that make them outsiders even in their hometown of Bascom, North Carolina. Even their garden has a reputation, famous for its feisty apple tree that bears prophetic fruit, and its edible flowers, imbued with special powers.
Generations of Waverleys tended this garden. Their history was in the soil. But so were their futures.
Together again in the house they grew up in, the Waverley sisters realize they must deal with their common legacy - if they are ever to feel at home in Bascom - or with each other.
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I so want to give it 5 stars...!!!!
- By Joihelene on 10-09-10
What listeners say about The Scenic Route: A Novel
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Pamela Harvey
- 02-14-12
A Must-listen!
You know how a new, soon-to-be favorite song grows on you after the first time you hear it? That's just like this book. Except that you move through the first "I don't know about this, but there is something I like in there" straight to the "I love this and I need to hear it again!" in the first listen. Of course this observation comes from someone who lived on an island in the summer and drove around barefoot in a car, depending solely on an AM radio for her listening pleasure. Before there were CDs or iPods, or hell, before there were cassettes and even before there was FM radio. And so the hearing of the new favorite song would be left to fate, "the universe", serendipity - whatever floats your boat and all that.
In the beginning, I was more than a little annoyed by the author's seemingly tedious peregrinations, both literary and actual, and her long, attenuated run-on sentences, thinking "ok this is fine for an MFA thesis, very inventive and lyrical, but ...seriously?", and vowed to give this book no more than a "2". I had that exact same feeling I'd get with a traveling companion I was riding with chose to follow a detour and my patience would give out. But I knew that no writer worthy of her craft would think that a simple Cinderella story would ever be enough. And so, the story of Sylvia and Henry uses mainly backstory to sustain itself, and I found this initially to be disturbing, hell, even sadistic, and why is this Binnie Kirshenbaum making me suffer so much for my prize at the end? But anyway I listened through all of the backstory and the "front story" and came to appreciate the technique of combining past with present, and to admire, even envy, the skill with which the two stories are combined.
Because I knew there was going to be that prize at the end and I knew that Cinerella's glass slipper would shatter in some way, and that would be the end of that. By a bit of foreshadowing, the author establishes a hint of the ending, just enough to keep you going like an addict jonesing for a fix and getting high just knowing the stuff is there. Or at least coming soon. anyway.
This is a great read, and it deals with so many issues, past and present, which in the hands of a lesser talent would be rendered trite, conventional, and also very difficult to follow. But Sylvia's story wanders happily along, seamlessly weaving stories within stories, as the narrative circles around for yet another loop, as the thoroughly relatable characters appear and disappear just at the right time.
Bravo!
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