06/07/2018 - Welcome: Australia & New Zealand Narrators and Authors

Week 11 of the SYNC for Audiobook listeners is upon us. Follow these girls lives and how we need to be looking beyond assumptions and preconceived ideas, to find the truth.

Girls Like Us

Written by Gail Gilies and narrated by two voice talents, Lauren Ezzo and Brittany Pressley.

A 2015 Schneider Family Book Award Winner.
With gentle humor and unflinching realism, Gail Giles tells the gritty, ultimately hopeful story of two special ed teenagers entering the adult world.
“We understand stuff. We just learn it slow. And most of what we understand is that people what ain’t Speddies think we too stupid to get out our own way. And that makes me mad.”
Quincy and Biddy are both graduates of their high school’s special ed program, but they couldn’t be more different: suspicious Quincy faces the world with her fists up, while gentle Biddy is frightened to step outside her front door. When they’re thrown together as roommates in their first real world apartment, it initially seems to be an uneasy fit. But as Biddy’s past resurfaces and Quincy faces a harrowing experience that no one should have to go through alone, the two of them realise,they might have more in common than they thought; and more important, that they might be able to help each other move forward.
Hard-hitting and compassionate, Girls Like Us is a story about growing up in a world that can be cruel, and finding the strength, and the support to carry on.

The Invisible Girls’. A memoir

Narrated by Kirsten Potter.
A girl scarred by her past. A refugee mother uncertain of her future. Five little girls who brought them together.
After nearly dying of breast cancer in her twenties, Sarah Thebarge fled her successful career, her Ivy League education and a failed relationship on the East Coast, then starting over in Portland, Oregon. She was hoping to quietly pick up the pieces of her broken life, but instead she met Hadhi and her daughters, which sets her out on an adventure she’d never anticipated.
Hadhi was fighting battles of her own. A Somali refugee abandoned by her husband, she was struggling to raise five young daughters in a culture she didn’t understand. When their worlds collided, Hadhi and the girls were on the brink of starvation in their own home, “invisible” in a neighborhood of strangers. As Sarah helped Hadhi and the girls navigate American life, her outreach to the family became a source of courage and a lifeline for herself.
Poignant, and at times shattering, Sarah Thebarge’s riveting memoir invites listeners into her story, finding connection, love, and redemption in the most unexpected places.