The Girls in the Stilt House

A Novel

By: Kelly Mustian

Narrated by: Johanna Parker

Length: 9 hrs and 56 mins

Publisher's summary

Murder breaks through the racial divide that separates two teenage girls, forging an unlikely friendship in this Southern debut that’s perfect for fans of Where the Crawdads Sing and If the Creek Don’t Rise.

Ada promised herself she would never go back to the Trace, to her unbearable life on the swamp, and to her harsh father in Mississippi. But now, after running away to Baton Rouge and briefly knowing a different kind of life, she finds herself with nowhere to go but back home. And she knows there will be a price to pay with her father.

Matilda, daughter of a sharecropper, is from the other side of the Trace. Doing what she can to protect her family from the whims and demands of some particularly callous locals is an ongoing struggle. She forms a plan to go north, to pack up the secrets she’s holding about her life in the South and hang them on the line for all to see.

As the two girls are drawn deeper into a dangerous world of bootleggers and moral corruption, they must come to terms with the complexities of their tenuous bond and a hidden past that links them in ways that could cost them their lives.

©2021 Kelly Mustian (P)2021 Blackstone Publishing

Wonderful

Wow!! I loved everything about this book!! The narrator was wonderful. The characters were so real. I loved every minute!!

grabs you from the start

I loved the book. She wrote a great story and the landscape is painted perfectly.

Ada and Maltilda

I loved listening to this book. I have always been told to push through hardships, and that is what our two young ladies do.

Needs different narrator

This story would most likely have been more enjoyable with a different narrator. It took quite some time to get used to the narrator to be able to tolerate listening to the story. The overall story was decent though. A little long-winded at times, but I wanted to see how things ended.

Good Story

I ended up speeding up the narration as the narrator was very difficult to listen to for me. I recommend reading the story.

Stick with it

I almost gave up ten minutes in, because the narrators cadence and intonation was so irritating. But the story and writing are engaging and compelling. Worth it to stick it out through a strange performance for a really great story.

Good story...narration NOT so much

The story was good so I tried to “shut out” the narration which was devoid of emotion!
I would l o v e to know how the voice and cadence of the narrator stayed exactly the same in descriptive sections AND sections which were terrifying for the characters?

Cadence of reader was difficult to listen to

The story over all was good and enjoyable, however the cadence of the reader was often trippy and semi reminiscent of slam poetry but in an awkward way. For someone who is extremely auditory, I had trouble not giving up multiple times because of it, but the story itself kept me going.

Read the book

I probably would’ve given this 5 stars if I’d read this myself. I wasn’t a fan of the narrator, I found myself zoning out and having to rewind a lot. If you make it to chapter 5, keep going, that’s where the book finally hooked me.

Frustrating

The plot would surely have held my interest, but I couldn’t get past the first chapter because the narration was like nails on a blackboard. I can usually adapt to any of the many different narrators’ cadences, but this speech was so affected I couldn’t hear the story. Disappointed.