In the past several months (it has probably been years now!), I have become rather addicted to audio books. I have had a library subscription with the Yuma County Library (they allowed me to use it for free as long as we spent part of the winter there - this year I paid to be a remote user). They have a large collection of audio books, and I have been checking them out, downloading them to my phone, and listening whenever I want. In many cases, the reader makes the book almost more like a radio drama than just reading the book.
I cannot remember how I got started on a series that I listened to in the past couple of months - the first book in the series is "Bloody Jack: Being An Account of the Curious Adventures of Mary “Jacky” Faber, Ship's Boy" -- the title doesn't even sound like something that I would look at twice, but something got me interested, and I downloaded the first book from the library. The reader of the book was Katherine Kellgren. Oh my, I was hooked! The books are probably more targeted toward teens or young readers (though they are pretty long, so I don't know). Katherine not only does all sorts of accents as she reads the books, with different voices for the main character (a teenage girl) versus the boys that she is on the ship with, and men and women with whom she interacts... but the books also frequently use song - sea shanties, or folk tunes (Mary "Jacky" Faber is from London, and the songs are sometimes Scottish or Irish) - and she sings them - not only does she sing them, but she sings them in the different voices - Mary's voice, or an older guy that she is performing with at one point when they are working to make money in a pub in Boston. Katherine is so creative!
At the end of one of the books, Katherine interviewed the author, L.A. Meyer. I was surprised to find out that the author was male - I don't know why, but because of his writing about a teenage girl, I figured a female author. He mentioned in the interview that her audiobook versions had produced an additional audience, and one of the reviews I read on Amazon essentially said, "the books are okay, but the audiobooks are outstanding!"
In the interview, the author mentioned that he had already written
the last book in the series, though he didn't know how many books there
would be... the "last" book was written. I'm thinking that he wrote the
last book because he knew that he was ill and, sure enough, the last
book was published after his death.
I found an interview of Katherine at an audio books event talking about one of the Bloody Jack books and how she kept the voices of the characters straight from book-to-book recording:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_M0W1ySvt4
I was looking for the interview between L.A. Meyer and Katherine, but haven't found a free version of that...
I enjoyed her performance in these books so much that I went to the Yuma Library looking for other books that she read. I have listened to some by other authors - they are good, but not as good as the Bloody Jack series. One of the series had 6 books, and when I got to the 6th book, it was a different reader... I thought, "Why would they have changed the reader?" Well, at the end of that book, there was again an interview between the reader and the author, and it came out that Katherine had died before book 6 was published. The author said that she called Katherine when the 6th book was done, and Katherine asked her to read the beginning of the book to her, which the author did. When she got to a place in book 6 where the "school song" was sung (something also done in the earlier books), the author said that Katherine joined her in singing the school song as they were on the phone together - the characters in the books being "friends" as Katherine viewed it.
If any of my blog readers have audiobooks that they would recommend, I would be interested to know it. I don't buy audio books (I'm too cheap), but, as I said, Yuma library has a lot, and I've recommended some additional ones to them which they have acquired, so if I know of a good one, I'll try to find it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Kellgren
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