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Christodora
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell, Christa Lewis, Suzanne Elise Freeman, Prentice Onayemi, Thom Rivera, Kyla Garcia, Will Damron
- Length: 17 hrs and 14 mins
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Publisher's summary
In this vivid and compelling novel, Tim Murphy follows a diverse set of characters whose fates intertwine in an iconic building in Manhattan's East Village, the Christodora.
The Christodora is home to Milly and Jared, a privileged young couple with artistic ambitions. Their neighbor, Hector, a Puerto Rican gay man who was once a celebrated AIDS activist but is now a lonely addict, becomes connected to Milly and Jared's lives in ways none of them can anticipate. Meanwhile, Milly and Jared's adopted son Mateo grows to see the opportunity for both self-realization and oblivion that New York offers.
As the junkies and protesters of the 1980s give way to the hipsters of the 2000s and they, in turn, to the wealthy residents of the crowded, glass-towered city of the 2020s, enormous changes rock the personal lives of Milly and Jared and the constellation of people around them.
Moving kaleidoscopically from the Tompkins Square Riots and attempts by activists to galvanize a true response to the AIDS epidemic, to the New York City of the future, Christodora recounts the heartbreak wrought by AIDS, illustrates the allure and destructive power of hard drugs, and brings to life the ever-changing city itself.
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- Billye Kay
- 11-10-19
Ambitious
Chirstadora is a very ambitious book. Like the folks who purchase and renovate the Christadora, the motives behind the effort are good, pure, and admirable. But like the characters, the writer can’t escape his own preconceived ideas about class, mental illness, race, and addiction. The use of multiple narrators helps to ‘guide’ the reader to like certain characters more than others. Some of the characters are painfully one dimensional while others are very well drawn but almost all of them remain annoying and unrelatable. I’m surprised that the community reviewers of this book are questioning the elements of the story that describe AIDS and the history surrounding the public health policies, activism, and therapies. This was the strongest element of the book. Much of the press coverage at the time was pretty localized and I appreciated learning more about what was going on in New York.
The story is interesting and engaging - I kept listening because I wanted to find out what would happen next. I also kept waiting for the, “If these walls could talk” aspect to develop (which it NEVER did!) For most of the time that I listened, I was willing to overlook the cringe worthy stereotyped portrayal of a foster family and the excruciating portrayal of a woman’s deep seated hatred of her mother because the story had me hooked and then the book just stopped. I can’t recommend it even though it made me think and it does contain flashes of brilliance.
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52 people found this helpful
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- Christopher
- 12-03-16
Very Honest and Accurate but not for everyone
I figure I'm around the same age as the author judging from the timeline of this novel. Spanning from the 1980's through today and beyond, I identified with a number of the characters and situations that they went through. Drug addiction, living through the early years of HIV/AIDS Activism, dealing with adoption, these are just a few of the topics dealt with in a very honest, and sometimes brutal, way. Tim Murphy is a gifted writer and deftly jumps back and forth through time, weaving and incredible tale of love, loneliness, addiction and recovery, and basic human desires. I listened to this in about 3 sittings, only stopping to sleep. I was fully immersed in this somewhat tragic yet vivid novel. I Highly recommend this novel, well worth the credit.
I just fell in love with the characters. The narration was beyond incredible. All narrators brought their A game when performing. Most I have heard before from other books, they each brought to life the intricate nuances of each character. Wow... just WOW. I didn't want it to end.
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49 people found this helpful
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- B.J.
- 01-02-17
Really didn't expect it to be this good.
Books with multiple characters and time frames often turn into mush at some point and are hard to follow, contrived or boring. This one is different. I wasn't sure about it for the first few hours, but then instead of deteriorating, it got terrific. A number of the characters are so real I thought about them when I wasn't listening. Definitely 5-stars for this accomplishment.
The narrators stayed in the background for me. I didn't pay attention to them at all but was purely focused on the story line. That's sort of amazing. The differences when a cast narrates can often be distracting and it was not at all the case. Another 5 stars here.
I think this is really a book about understanding and acceptance. I didn't find it to be depressing at all. Rather, I found it to be a terrific explanation of why people sometimes do what they do. And even when you don't agree with the behavior, you can at least see how they arrived at it. No, it's not neat and tidy. But neither is life.
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47 people found this helpful
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- Richard
- 06-22-17
Title is more of a state of mind then a place
Having lived in New York through the HIV/ AIDS epidemic it was odd to read a book that had a number of characters based on people I knew and worked with. When the author focuses on the people in that part of the story, I found myself listening more intently. 'The Plague' and it's aftermath is still a riveting narrative of a people, place and time.
Unfortunately "Christodora" is mostly about several, not very interesting people, whose lives are only peripheraly affected by AIDS with the major exceptions of Hector, the Puerto Rican activist, Anna, his intial boss at the NY Health Department and Isabel, the Latina girl from Queens who becomes infected with HIV and then finds her voice in the movement to fight AIDS. Each, while important, are bascally secondary to the story.
The bulk of "Christodora" centers on Milly, the artist daughter of Anna and her adopted son Mateo, Isabel's secret son, who grows up to be an artist also. The conflict between mother and son forms much of the book and neither were interesting enough for me to care about. Both were so self-centered in their own way that I wanted to shake them and say 'grow up!'
The various narrators didn't help much either. Both the readers of Milly and Mateo seemed to emphasize the characters blandness and Anna's played to the worst of the upper-middle class Jewish stereotypes. Upper East Side New York by way the the European shtetl. Even more offensively, given that Tim Murphy is himself gay, ALL the the gay characters sounded like they were each competing for a knock off of "Ru Paul's Drag Race". I haven't heard this much bitchy dialogue since the last time I was at 'Lips' in the village. Only the woman speaking for Isabel gave her the fiery passion and heartbreaking loneliness this young, scard, proud girl deserved.
After finishing "Christodora" I had the image of Eighth Street in the village, once so vibrant and hip, then commercial and now just filled with boarded up shops with 'For Rent' signs all over.
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30 people found this helpful
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- GCS18
- 12-20-16
Whoa Where Did THAT Come From?
Beautiful and painful, this book sucked me in and took me somewhere else, even if it is just somewhere else in the city I live in. By the end I had cried, seriously cried several times and I can't remember ever shedding tears while reading a book. I so identified with the main character I started to feel what she felt and it's been a while since a book took me close to that. The only thing I wish is that a couple of he characters were more developed ....but really I just adored it.
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29 people found this helpful
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- Bonny
- 09-27-19
The story kept me listening
I bought this off reviews, with no knowledge of the author. I loved the characters and the story; they are very compelling, and kept me going, though I was irritated by some of the narration and writing. A couple of the narrators were excellent, but most were somewhat clunky. Sometimes the reader for the character of Hector had him speak with a Puerto Rican accent, sometimes with an extreme Long Island one. More than one of the narrators? Reads commas like question marks? Which gets old really fast? I found Millie the hardest character to get into because of the narrator. Her voice was so breathy and high that she sounded vapid and insipid. The writing is serviceable. There is a lot of redundancy; it felt as though the author doesn't trust his readers to remember things, so we get the same details multiple times. It feels like a first or second draft at times. That said, though, it's an engaging book with some good history. If you are interested in AIDS history, you should also try The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, which is an excellent novel about the AIDS crisis in Chicago. The audiobook is a great way to experience it.
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21 people found this helpful
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- Boots
- 07-21-17
The Christodora
Too long ... too depressing ... I enjoyed the characters, but overall I found this story 'scatterbrained'.
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- Jodi
- 11-17-16
Spectacular
I bought this book based on a recommendation indicating that if I liked A Little Life, I may like this. They are of a similar style and both so deep and able to touch at that string of what connects us.
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- Sara
- 03-04-18
AIDS Addiction and Art In NYC
Gritty and raw storytelling that at times became hard to follow because it often had a scattered and nonlinear approach. In the end, while sections of the writing were captivating, I found myself avoiding the book because it was just too sad and depressing. So much goes completely wrong with these often endearing characters that at times it became too overwhelming. Just too much predictable disaster, betrayal and sadness. Do be prepared for difficult and painful listening ahead in this sweeping saga of NYC circa 1980-2020.
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- Jennifer Masterson
- 08-23-16
Amazing!!!
This is a must listen! Phenomenal novel that lives up to the hype. Easy to follow with the multiple narrators. It's being made into a limited TV Series. Get the book before all your friends do! Highly recommended!!!
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In his early forties, nonprofit writer Tip Murray is just getting past the wreckage of his youth and settling into semi-humdrum married New England domesticity. Things take an unusual turn when he receives shocking news from his high school best friend, hippie farmer Natalie, that one of their former teammates from speech team, Pete, has committed suicide. Surprisingly mentioned in Pete’s final Facebook post? A devastating comment made to him by their speech team coach, Gary Gold.
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Beth is the darling of God Halsa, a pharmaceutical giant, and she’s got the outrageous salary and lifestyle to prove it. Until she lands in white-collar women’s prison, thanks to a high-profile whistleblower suit. Sam, Beth’s husband, used to be the town’s most eligible bachelor, and he’s never had to do anything for himself. Until his wife goes to jail, and he’s left to raise two daughters on his own. Lise, the au pair, is the whistle-blower. But is she? Everyone knows she’s not clever enough to have done it alone.
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very not good
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The Girl from Bletchley Park
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- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
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Overall
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1942. Three years into the war, Pam turns down her hard-won place at Oxford University to become a codebreaker at Bletchley Park. There, she meets two young men both keen to impress her, and Pam finds herself falling hard for one of them. But as the country’s future becomes more uncertain by the day, a tragic turn of events casts doubt on her choice. Present day. Julia is struggling to juggle her career, two children and a husband increasingly jealous of her success. Her brother presents her with the perfect distraction: photos of their grandmother as a young woman at Bletchley Park.
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Bletchley Park...
- By Debbie Thompson on 11-26-21
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Mary DiNunzio has been slaving away for the past eight years trying to make partner in her cutthroat Philadelphia law firm. She's too busy to worry about the crank phone calls she's been getting - until they fall into a sinister pattern. The phone rings as soon as she gets to work, then as soon as she gets home. Mary can't shake the sensation that someone is watching her, following her every move. The shadowboxing turns deadly when her worst fears are realized, and she has to fight for something a lot more important than partnership: her life.
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- Narrated by: Natasha Soudek
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In The Summer Book Tove Jansson distills the essence of the summer - its sunlight and storms - into 22 crystalline vignettes. This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia's grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland. The grandmother is unsentimental and wise, if a little cranky; Sophia is impetuous and volatile, but she tends to her grandmother with the care of a new parent.
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GORGEOUS. FULL OF GRACE. NEEDED THIS.
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When floundering and unlucky-in-love 20-something Lottie Jones lands a new career as a wedding planner at a top-tier boutique event firm, she begins navigating a cutthroat workplace specializing in over-the-top details, unlimited budgets, and a broad spectrum of taste. Whether planning for parachute landings or wrangling intoxicated groomsmen, she has her hands full at every million-dollar wedding she helps organize.
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But her life has changed. She now has her doctorate in history. Her workaday hours are spent at St. Elizabeth’s College, mostly squandered in history department shriek-fests. She is also a widow. Her husband Bob died one half-day after triumphantly finishing the New York City Marathon in four hours and twelve minutes. And although 20 years have passed without seeing him, she still cannot get her former lover, Nelson Sharpe of the Nassau County Police Department, out of her system.
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When Charlie Boykin was young, he thought his life with his single mother on the working-class side of Nashville was perfectly fine. But when his mother arranges for him to be admitted as a scholarship student to an elite private school, he is suddenly introduced to what the world can feel like to someone cushioned by money. That world, he discovers, is an almost irresistible place where one can bend—and break—rules and still end up untarnished.
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Based on actual events that happened between 2005 and 2009 in a remote Mennonite community where more than 100 girls and women were drugged unconscious and assaulted in the night by what they were told (by the men of the colony) were "ghosts" or "demons", Miriam Toews' bold and affecting novel Women Talking is an imagined response to these real events.
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Funny how a man read “Women talking” to me
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The Sign for Home
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Arlo Dilly is young, handsome, and eager to meet the right girl. He also happens to be DeafBlind, a Jehovah’s Witness, and under the strict guardianship of his controlling uncle. His chances of finding someone to love seem slim to none. And yet, it happened once before: Many years ago, at a boarding school for the Deaf, Arlo met the love of his life—a mysterious girl with onyx eyes and beautifully expressive hands which told him the most amazing stories. But tragedy struck, and their love was lost forever.
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Best book I’ve read in a long time
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