Armchair Audies (Bonus!) Category Report: Solo Narration - Female

I'm not an official Armchair Audies judge for the Solo Narration - Female category, but I listened to them all, and I'm opinionated, so I'm posting my report. (The Audies bring out all kinds of wonkiness in me. More audiobooks! MORE! I love my audiobooks.) (In case you hadn't noticed.)

So: the nominees are

THE BOY IN THE SUITCASE Lene Kaaberbøl, Agnete Friis Read by Katherine Kellgren (AudioGO) Read the review
THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZL. Frank Baum Read by Anne Hathaway (Audible, Inc.) Read the review
THE UNSEEN GUESTMaryrose Wood Read by Katherine Kellgren (Harper Audio) Read the review
CALL THE MIDWIFEJennifer Worth Read by Nicola Barber (HighBridge Audio) Read the review
JULIET IN AUGUSTDianne Warren Read by Cassandra Campbell (Tantor Media) Read the review

And I've posted about Juliet in August and The Boy in the Suitcase.

A little about the others: 

Worth's Call the Midwife is anthropologically interesting. It's nice. But I never quite got past feeling like I was at a lecture, despite the nice descriptive details. Barber does a fine job of narrating, but I wasn't engaged. 

Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is one gonzo loopdiloop of a book. I mean, the movie doesn't begin to do it justice. Lands where everything's made out of china, and magical wish-granting hats, and those slippers are silver, not ruby. Hathaway comes up with some funny voices and seems to fully enjoy the material, so it was fun to listen, even though she seemed to breathe in odd places sometimes. 

Wood's The Unseen Guest is the third in her funny Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place series. It's kid lit, about a governess who finds herself in charge of three foundling siblings who appear to have been raised by wolves. They speak in a series of yips and howls, and mangled words, and are wont to go dashing out after their pet squirrel or otherwise end up in hot water. Not helping matters are the mysterious happenings with the other inhabitants of Ashton Place and the specter of threats from unknown external sources. Kellgren proves again her versatility and genius with voices as she produces wolf and bird language in addition to human, and listening to her read this series is nearly as entrancing as listening to her read my beloved Jacky Faber series. 

Kellgren also does a stellar job with the names and language demands of The Boy in the Suitcase, and really, either one of her titles in this category could easily win the award for her. 

But despite my delight in her work, my pick for the win is Campbell's narration of Juliet in August, partly because I liked the text itself more, but also because Campbell so fully inhabited the deceptively simple town and kept me fully present throughout the book.

Scandinavian Thrills and Chills

Another review on a title courtesy of Audiobook Jukebox.
Publisher: AudioGo, Pub. Date: December 13, 2011, Length: 8 hours, 41 minutes



Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis are the co-authors of the Nina Borg thriller series, which center on Nina, a Red Cross worker who tends to run into situations. I wasn't familiar with any of that going into this book, but it didn't really matter - I might have cared a little more about what was happening with her marriage as she dealt with finding The Boy in the Suitcase, but really, that boy was the whole point. 


The plot: a three-year-old boy has been kidnapped from Lithuania, stripped, drugged, and transported to Denmark inside a suitcase. Nina's friend Karin works for the man who seems to be paying for the boy. When Karin finds the suitcase she freaks, quits, and picks Nina as the person to dump all this on. As so often happens in thrillers, knowing the main character can be a curse, and Karin ends up dead before long. Meanwhile, Nina, unsure who the boy is, what language he speaks, or what kind of situation he'd be in if she went to the authorities, opts to piss off her husband by taking off without any sort of explanation. She and the boy find Karin's body, evade the killer, and set off to find answers however Nina can. The boy's mother, Sigita, is working with the Lithuanian authorities to trace him, bombarded with nightmare visions of human trafficking and memories of the rough road single teen parenting has been thus far. 


The pacing is tight, which I always appreciate, and the authors create so many different and distinct POVs for the narrative, but I wish there had been a greater sense of immediacy to create more tension in the plot. And while there is a wide range of characters - rich men, poor women, dreamers, schemers - they don't always go much deeper than their descriptions. "Determined underdog teen mom with a sharp mind and disapproving relatives" and "social climbing businessman who wants his in-laws' approval" may be all we need to know about the boy's mom and the man who has tried to purchase him, but a little more complexity could have gone a long way.


Katherine Kellgren is an ideal narrator for this type of novel. She excels at creating different voices without forcing irritating affectations upon them. (I just listened to a narrator who practically whinnied when portraying an elderly woman, so I'm especially appreciative of that skill at the moment.) She also handles non-English names and place names with ease, and employs very effective pacing as things got tense in the narrative. There were still moments early on when I had to work to remember which one Nina was and how she related to Karin and how she related to Sigita, etc., but that's a constant drawback with audios with so many POV shifts. Overall, she really brought the text to life for me, and I was left feeling that this was one of those cases when the reader made the book better.