The August Audiobook of the Month

By Dustin Rowles | Books | August 29, 2024 |

By Dustin Rowles | Books | August 29, 2024 |

Over a decade ago, Pajiba alum Joanna Robinson (now a podcast queen and New York Times bestselling author) introduced me to Kristopher Jansma’s dazzling debut novel, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, instantly making me a fan.

Jansma, a creative writing professor, writes as though he adheres to his creative writing instruction. As a writer who regularly produces 2-5,000 words daily, I’m reminded of stories from my own creative writing classes about great authors who would dedicate an entire day to perfecting a single paragraph or sentence. Jansma seems to belong to this meticulous group of writers. He crafts his prose with precision and beauty, ensuring that every word serves a purpose.

Jansma’s skill is particularly evident in his ability to write a concise novel about expansive topics like World War II and generational trauma (take note, every other author ever who has written a WWII novel). His latest work, Our Narrow Hiding Places, exemplifies that talent for writing, but it’s also a terrific piece of storytelling.

Our Narrow Hiding Places is centered on Mieke, a grandmother who lives on the Jersey Shore, whose past growing up in Holland is conjured by a visit from her grandson, Will. Mieke lived through the Dutch famine, a part of World War II history I was unfamiliar with. During the last year of the war, as the Nazis were losing to the Allies, a German blockade cut off food to the German-occupied Netherlands, resulting in around 20,000 deaths. Mieke lived through it, but the trauma she experienced was passed on to both her son and grandson in their DNA, and also in the way that secrets shaped their lives.

Despite the subject matter, it’s far from a bummer of a novel — parts of the story, in fact, are relayed to us by a chorus of eels, a delightful bit of magical realism to accompany the brilliantly drawn characters in Mieke and Will.

Edoardo Ballerini reads the audiobook, coincidentally the same narrator of July’s audiobook of the month — he’s narrated several great audiobooks, including Trust by Hernan Diaz and a couple of Amor Towles’ books (he’s particularly good with accents that do not sound like a white guy doing accents).

Honorable mention this month goes to another author Joanna introduced me to around the same time. She sent me Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor and Park a little over a decade ago, and Rowell’s latest, Slow Dance, reminds me a lot of that book. It’s a romantic comedy novel about best friends from high school who never acted on their attraction to each other until it was too late… and then the two meet again 14 years later and try to rekindle their magic. Rowell is very good at writing about lovesickness. She’s also very funny, and Slow Dance is an absolute treat to read.