WAKE THE BONES
by Elizabeth Kilcoyne, for Macmillan Audio
Wake the Bones is a dark, atmospheric debut about the complicated feelings that arise when the place you call home becomes hostile. After dropping out of college, all Laurel wanted was to resume her life as a tobacco hand and taxidermist and try not to think about the boy she can’t help but love. Now, she must unravel her mother’s terrifying legacy and tap into her own innate magic before her future and the fate of everyone she loves is doomed.
“Bailey Carr narrates with good pacing. The eerie story involves dark magic, a haunted farm, dead animals, and nightmares from the past. An overarching question is presented: what to do when the place you call home terrifies you? Carr is spot-on as she voices a wide range of characters and paints vivid depictions for listeners. “
-Audiofile Magazine
WHEN THE MOON WAS OURS
by Anna Marie McLemore, for Audible Studios
Atmospheric, dynamic, and packed with gorgeous prose. To everyone who knows them, best friends Miel and Sam are as strange as they are inseparable. But as odd as everyone considers Miel and Sam, even they stay away from the Bonner girls, four beautiful sisters rumored to be witches. Now they want the roses that grow from Miel's skin, convinced that their scent can make anyone fall in love. And they're willing to use every secret Miel has fought to protect to make sure she gives them up.
Raviv Ullman and Bailey Carr infuse their narrations with wonder and awe befitting a tale full of strange and beautiful things. Steeped in magical realism, it's the story of a girl who grows roses from her wrists and turns pumpkins to glass and a boy who paints moons and keeps secrets. A blossoming romance ensues. Ullman's tone is one of reverence, as if he's delivering a ballad oft recounted, while Carr's is one of desperate yearning. Their approaches are well balanced and reflect the way the narrative is shared equally between both characters. This mix of quiet and passion serves the story, which is fast paced but also possesses a poetic quality. A rich, layered performance.
-Audiofile Magazine
WESTSIDE
by W.M. Akers, for Harper Audio
A young detective who specializes in “tiny mysteries” finds herself at the center of a massive conspiracy in this beguiling historical fantasy set on Manhattan’s Westside - a peculiar and dangerous neighborhood home to strange magic and stranger residents. Westside is a mystery steeped in the supernatural and shot through with gunfights, rotgut whiskey, and sizzling Dixieland jazz. Full of dazzling color, delightful twists, and truly thrilling action.
“In the vividly depicted 1920s version of Manhattan conjured up in W.M. Akers’ fantasy mystery Westside, convincingly narrated by Bailey Carr, the island is split down the center by the great wall of Broadway. To the east, the Metropolis teeming with rich and poor, hot jazz and speak-easies. To the west, a much more “anything goes” realm of inexplicable happenings and shadowy, weirdly shifting landscapes.Akers’ worldbuilding is ravishing, and Carr presents it all to us with breathless immediacy: I can’t wait to hear her readings of the sequels.”
-Seattle Times
THE MOONLIGHT HEALERS
by Elizabeth Becker, for Harper Audio
A powerful debut with a magical twist about one woman’s discovery of her family’s secret healing abilities and the mysterious consequences she must contend with when she uses them on someone she loves. For generations, the Winston women have possessed an unspoken magical gift: they can heal with the touch of a hand. But not every healer has rightfully passed on this knowledge to her descendants, and for young Louise Winston, the discovery of her abilities comes in less-than-ideal circumstances. Desperate for answers, Louise escapes to her grandmother’s lush Appalachian orchard. There, she uncovers her family’s hidden history in a tattered journal. But just as Louise begins to embrace her unique legacy, she learns that it can also come with a mysterious cost. Spanning eighty years, The Moonlight Healers is a deeply empathetic, heartfelt novel about mothers and daughters, life and death, and the beautiful resilience of love.
THE PREMONITIONS CLUB
by Gwendolyn Womack, for Blackstone Audio
When Liv Hall and her friends find boxes of letters hidden in her grandfather’s attic, they discover hundreds of psychic predictions addressed to the Premonitions Bureau, a bureau to investigate psychic abilities that mysteriously closed in 1993. As the group reads decades-old premonitions, they stumble on letters from powerful psychics who mailed in their predictions and then disappeared. A post online about the found predictions alerts a black ops group in charge of the military’s paranormal research, who will do anything to get their hands on the letters and the psychics who wrote them. Liv and her friends now know too much, and they’re directly in the crosshairs. To survive, they’re going to have to rely on each other and the unlikely help of psychics who thought they’d left the dangers of the Bureau behind forever.
THE RUIN OF EROS
by Maya Gryffin
Every year our town celebrates Eros, god of desire, in a special festival. But this year there’s to be a pageant like never before, and out of all the girls in Sikyon, I’ve been chosen to play the part of Aphrodite. They tell me it’s an honor… but I'm about to find out it's a curse. When our tribute goes disastrously wrong, Aphrodite demands a sacrifice... and that sacrifice is me. But then a mysterious stranger intervenes, and offers me my life back, for a price. He won't tell me who he is, or show me his face, and when he reveals his jet-black wings, it's obvious he's no mortal man. But by then, the bargain is made, and the bond is sealed. Now he thinks he owns me, but little does he realize I’m hatching plans of my own. Plans for my freedom. Plans to get my family back. And plans that just might upend all of Olympus. My mysterious captor won't know what hit him. I was ready to turn the world of the gods upside down. I just didn't think mine would capsize with it.