#audiobook sync

I can’t wait to listen to Saving Montgomery Sole, and I think you’ll love it, too! Mariko Tamaki wrote this book about small-town life in California, where Monty Sole tries to understand high school and the homophobia she encounters about her moms. She’d rather be exploring all the unexplained mysteries of ESP, astrology, and superpowers with her best friends — and eating frozen yogurt. 

Biddy and Quincy are two special education students who are placed in the same house after they graduate from their high school. Their unique gifts and strengths are quickly apparent and compelling in the voices of the two narrators, Lauren Ezzo and Brittany Pressley. It’s an honest, haunting, heartbreaking, and humorous story that will ultimately be triumphant. 

A Scottish noble, inspired by witches, murders to become a king and then loses himself in brutality. The LA Theatre Works narrators and sound effects will bring Shakespeare’s darkest tragedy to life for all listeners. 

that’s a photo of narrator Christine Hvam....the rest here celebrates:

A Week for Eyes-closed Listening

 We’ve paired audiobooks for Week 6 of the 2018 AudiobookSYNC season that you can read with your eyes shut.

Welcome to the world of completely blind Will, in Josh Sundquist’s LOVE AND FIRST SIGHT, wonderfully narrated by Pat Young. It would be a shame to do anything with your eyes while listening to this mix of humor, romance, adventure, and difficulties you might not have contemplated with your eyes wide open. Will’s got great solutions, too! You might discover a new appreciation for those scratch and sniff stickers after listening.

The world created by Robyn Schneider in EXTRAORDINARY MEANS has even more threats to life and welfare. It also has two extraordinary narrators sharing the unfolding tale of companionship turning to love: listen to Khristine Hvam and James Fouhey become Sadie and Lane while you do nothing at all so as to best share their world in which they discover each other and themselves, a world threatened, by all things, with a cure.

You’re going to love Love and First Sight!

Will has been blind since he was born, and he has just started at a new school. After a rough start, he very quickly finds new friends, finds himself attracted to a quiet, bright girl named Cecily, gets experimental surgery on his eyes and sees for the first time — it’s a lot! Pat Young narrates the audiobook and helps listeners imagine the full cast of characters.

If you lead a book discussion group or program, you know it can be difficult to round up sufficient copies for everyone to read ahead of the discussion meeting. AudiobookSYNC is a great—and free—solution. Check out the season calendar, find a title that your group will find engaging, and let everyone know which week to get their free download. You’ll want to schedule the title’s discussion two or three weeks after the title’s availability from SYNC so that everyone has the chance to read it with their ears.

Discussing audiobooks has some similarities and some important differences to discussing books the group has read with their eyes. Remember to get your group focused on how the performance, and the performer, adds to the author’s own voice. How does listening bring attention to details fast readers in your group might miss when scanning a page? Is there a new word, or even a language, the group learns to recognize by sound when they listen to the audiobook?

Week 3 of the 2018 SYNC season offers a pair of highly discussable audiobooks your group might want to consider. Abbas Kazerooni’s autobiography, ON TWO FEET AND WINGS will take your group to a corner of the world, and some real life experiences, unfamiliar to them. JOHNNY GET YOUR GUN, John Ball’s mystery, one in his mid-20th century series about police detective Virgil Tibbs, suggests a host of discussion topics for your book group:

Which character does each group member find most like them?

What question would each one ask Virgil Tibbs if they were interviewing him?

What questions about his preparation to read this book would the group ask of professional narrator Dion Graham?

Media-rich Week 2 

Both titles offered for free during the 2nd week of SYNC’s 9th season offer teens many different ways to explore their narratives. Both audiobooks are narrated by their authors and both author-narrators contribute in other media formats readily reached on the Web. Watch and listen to Luis Alberto Urrea’s in-depth interview about researching—and living—the border experiences that became this week’s THE DEVIL’S HIGHWAY. Tune in to the music of Randy Preston in Kwame Alexander’s SOLO. Communication takes many forms; this pair of free audiobooks reminds us that words can be expanded with music, sight, and conversation.