Love is the basis of this week’s selection of audiobooks: the love shared between friends, family members, couples and even the burgeoning love of adolescents.
Shotgun Lovesongs
Nickolas Butler; read by Ari Fliakos, Maggie Hoffman, Scott Sheperd, Scott Sowers and Gary Wilmes
Macmillan Audio; 10 hours; eight CDs; $39.99/www.audible.com download, $27.99
Five different characters take turns narrating what is essentially a bromance, though their romantic encounters with the ladies play heavily into the plot. The story kicks off when four old friends from Wisconsin farmland come together again as adults for a wedding. The narrator is a married guy who’s the steady center of the relationships, one is a famous country music star, another is a bigwig businessman, and the last is a damaged alcoholic who is the sweetest of the bunch. Though first-time novelist Butler occasionally overstates, at heart, this is a charming, old-fashioned, unabashedly sentimental story that simply delights. Using different narrators for the various characters was a brilliant move, as each is polished and well worth hearing. Grade: A-minus
Eleanor and Park
Rainbow Rowell; read by Rebecca Lowman and Sunil Malhotra
Listening Library; nine hours; seven CDs; $50/www.audible.com download, $32.20
Rowell is one of those authors who gets inside her characters’ heads and imbues them with a reality so delightfully flawed and subversively wicked that we cannot help but like them. Set over the course of a school year in 1986, this tale of two star-crossed and intelligent misfits feels realistic because they are clever enough to know that first love almost never lasts, but they give it a shot anyway. Though listed as a young-adult title, it is quite sophisticated and covers topics both serious and whimsical, from bullying to mix tapes to battered women. The narrators sound appropriately youthful and bring energy and wry humor to banter that flows with realistic ease. Grade: A-minus
Soy Sauce for Beginners
Kirstin Chen; read by Nancy Wu
Brilliance Audio; 17 hours and 43 minutes; seven CDs; $24.99/www.audible.com download, $17.49
This is a lovely little story about familial love, duty, growing up and finding oneself. It is perfect for easy listening in that it entertains but it isn’t going to change your life or even take up space in your memory. There are, however, a lot of fun facts about Singaporean culture and the making of soy sauce. When Gretchen Lin leaves San Francisco and her cheating husband, she returns to her native home of Singapore, a difficult and ailing mother, and a family business she hoped to never join. It turns out that embracing one’s past instead of eschewing it may not be all that bad after all. Narrator Wu saturates the story with a true Asian accent, several dialects and variations in tone for different characters. Grade: B-plus
The Forever Girl
Alexander McCall Smith; read by Susan Lyons
Recorded Books; 10 hours and 30 minutes; nine CDs/www.audible.com download, $27.99
It is not often that an audiobook is so boring that one wishes it sent to an ignoble demise, preferably one involving cement blocks and a river. This misstep by McCall Smith is so tedious one can hardly believe it is by the author of the highly entertaining “No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” series. While the depiction of British expatriate life in the Caymans is convincing, the audiobook’s two love stories fall flat. One depicts a married woman and a doctor, the other involves the woman’s daughter and a boy she has loved since grade school. There is a lot of anxiety, hours of internal analytical dissection, and yet nothing ever happens. Thankfully, narrator Lyons does a commendable job keeping up the pace and embodying the different characters. Grade: C-minus
