Vermont, Maine and Massachusetts are the settings for audiobook novels that are, by turns, wacky, weird, lightweight, and grimly serious.
“Country People: A Novel”
By Daniel Mason, read by MacLeod Andrews, Jason Culp, Maggi-Meg Reed, Kirby Heyborne, Mark Bramhall, Cassandra Campbell, Michael Crouch, Mark Deakins, Kaleo Griffith, Sean Patrick Hopkins, Hillary Huber, George Newbern and, Kirsten Potter. Random House Audio, 9¼ hours, $22. Available through all Rhode Island public libraries.
Miles and Kate are the furthest thing in the world from country people when they move from California to rural Vermont because Kate gets a one-year college teaching appointment. Miles is a dozen years past the deadline for his doctoral dissertation, whose topic keeps shifting on a spectrum from Tolstoy to Russian folk tales, so it doesn’t matter where he lives; he can write — or not write — anywhere.
No, the country people in question are the ones Miles meets once they move. Most notably, the members of a society that believes there’s an underground world you can reach from caves in the nearby landscape, with its own sun hanging in a hollow universe, and perhaps even other worlds cleverly stacked inside that globe as well.
Miles’ encounters with these folks, and others around the bizarro landscape, full of vivid folks from horny ski instructors to academics trying to make it as farmers, are sweetly told. And they’re interspersed with chunks of local radio, where the host of a call-in advice show manages both an off-the-wall set of regular callers and a rotating group of experts on topics ranging from antiques to swimming pool repair.
Mason, who’s from California, nonetheless has a strong sense of his locale. He keeps a strong hand on all this madness, reminding listeners from time to time that this is fiction. He’s got a wicked sense of humor that manages to laugh with, rather than at, his characters.
And the large cast of narrators is equally good. Andrews is spectacular as the main narrator, with a voice full of skepticism and ripping fun. The rest, including some of the best in the business in Heyborne, Bramhall and Campbell, play the host, callers and experts whose radio shenanigans make a bright counterpoint to the main story.
“The Forest Becomes Her: A Novel”
By Julie Carrick Dalton, read by Jennifer Blom, Mia Hutchinson-Shaw, and Alexandra Ryan. Macmillan Audio, 11¼ hours, $26.99.
Concord, Massachusetts — home of Louisa May Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. A town, writes the Massachusetts and New Hampshire-based Dalton, “where history felt more important than the future.”
That’s the setting for this novel about what happens when, despite being owned by a venerable preservation trust, one of the state’s last old-growth forests is razed to make room for a housing development. All except for one 400-year-old oak tree.
The tree draws the attention of Polly, a girl who has lived near it all her life; Hazel, a young wife who’s carrying her first child, and lives in one of the new houses; and Stella, who works for the developer and lives across the street from Hazel. Each is deeply affected by the loss of the trees. And soon, their lives are intertwined, as Polly fights to restore the old oak’s declining health, Hazel copes with personal heartache, and Stella tries to figure out how the murdered forest can be redeemed. And what of the town’s other old-growth forest, now threatened by development as well?
There are supernatural overtones here, too, but telling you too much about that would be a spoiler. Suffice it to say that Dalton, a journalist and author of other novels including “The Last Beekeeper,” keeps the story feeling realistic even when the characters aren’t sure whether they’re losing their minds.
Blom, Hutchinson-Shaw and Ryan take turns reading chapters that center on the main characters. The differences between their readings are minor, but each manages to find the right voice for not just her protagonist, but other characters as well.
“Nantucket Second Chances”
By Pamela Kelley, read by Stephanie Németh-Parker. Sourcebooks, 7¾ hours, $27.99. Available through all Rhode Island public libraries.
The latest Nantucket-based novel by bestselling Massachusetts author Kelley focuses on Claire Shipman, the well-off wife of a Manhattan financial planner who has just gotten a triple whammy: She’s pregnant, her husband is leaving her for another woman, and that other woman is pregnant, too.
Make that a quadruple whammy — her husband tells her he’s lost all their money and can’t afford alimony or child support.
So Claire flees to the island where she grew up, and she and her teenage daughter, Lily, move in with Claire’s mother. There, Claire gets an idea: She can take a few of the high-end designer handbags and shoes she won’t be using anymore — think Birkin bags, Mini Kellys and Louboutins — and sell them to raise some cash. Soon, though, this morphs into a bigger idea. She’ll open a shop where she can display her things, and some of her friends’ unwanted stuff, too. And she’ll call it Nantucket Second Chances.
Get it? Second chances for her possessions, and for her? It’s as clear, and as obvious, as everything else in this book, from her relationships with her friends and family (uniformly positive, with everyone helping her plan and promote her new venture, and frequent refrains of “Claire loved the idea”) to her self-centered, conniving soon-to-be-ex-husband. If you’re looking for a tale with a twist, or anything happening that you didn’t anticipate, this won’t be the story for you.
Németh-Parker, a three-time AudioFile Earphones winner, does an admirable job of creating distinct voices for everyone from Lily and her high-school friends to Claire’s grandmother. But even she can’t make the story more subtle or interesting.
“Storm Tide: A Novel”
By Paul Doiron, read by Henry Leyva. Macmillan, 10½ hours, $26.99.
A man stumbles out of his burning home, his body overwhelmed with flames. Nearby, a woman holds the man’s baby in her arms.
So begins the 16th novel in the Edgar-nominated Doiron’s series about Maine game warden Mike Bowditch. Bowditch has been demoted from investigator to plain old warden because of previous episodes that caused his superiors heartburn. But that doesn’t stop him from puzzling over a grim series of killings disguised to look like accidents. Who’s behind them, and what links them to one another — and to him?
Bowditch needs to find the links, and keep more murders from happening. Especially when he realizes that he — and his pregnant wife, Stacey — may be the next targets.
Doiron, a Maine native, has a way with description that places you right there on the Maine coast. What Bowditch is trying to figure out is neither too hard nor too easy. And don’t worry if you’ve never encountered this series before. I hadn’t, and there was just enough backstory to let me know who was who, and how their backgrounds fit the plot, without getting in the way of the narrative.
Leyva — a veteran actor who has appeared in everything from the old TV soap “One Life to Live” to the Off-Broadway incarnation of the musical “In the Heights” — offers lots of strong characterizations to back up Doiron’s words, including a nice Down East accent for Bowditch’s father-in-law.
Alan Rosenberg is a retired executive editor of The Providence Journal and has been reviewing audiobooks for more than two decades. Reach him at .
