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River, Cross My Heart
- Narrated by: Karen Chilton
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
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Publisher's Summary
The acclaimed best seller - a selection of Oprah's Book Club - that brings vividly to life the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC, circa 1925, a community reeling from a young girl's tragic death.
Five-year-old Clara Bynum is dead, drowned in the Potomac River in the shadow of a seemingly haunted rock outcropping known locally as the Three Sisters.
River, Cross My Heart, which marks the debut of a wonderfully gifted new storyteller, weighs the effect of Clara's absence on the people she has left behind: her parents, Alice and Willie Bynum, torn between the old world of their rural North Carolina home and the new world of the city, to which they have moved in search of a better life for themselves and their children; the friends and relatives of the Bynum family in the Georgetown neighborhood they now call home; and, most especially, Clara's sister, 10-year-old Johnnie Mae, who must come to terms with the powerful and confused emotions stirred by her sister's death as she struggles to decide what kind of woman she will become.
This highly accomplished first novel resonates with ideas, impassioned lyricism, and poignant historical detail as it captures an essential part of the African-American experience in our century.
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What listeners say about River, Cross My Heart
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Performance
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- Notsokeen
- 01-24-23
Great story!
It was a great story however so true in the racism and segregation that was incredibly blatant at that time. I didn’t want the book to end and was so sad when it did. I wanted to hear of Johnnie May’s journey with all the possibilities she had within her. Highly recommend.
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Performance
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Story
- Mary Aalgaard
- 08-12-20
Heartbreaking and Beautifully written
I listened to the newly released audio of this book. Karen Chilton is an excellent narrator for this historical novel, set in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., around 1925. Johnnie Mae, age 10, who is often put in charge of her younger sister Clara, feels responsible when Clara drowns in the Potomac River one day when she is swimming with her friends. Johnnie Mae dives and dives and tries to find her, but the river claimed her life. Her body is recovered, and the hearts of her family are broken. This is a story about grief and family. It's about growing up in a segregated America and the Black experience.
One reason that the girls are swimming in the dangerous Potomac River is because they aren't allowed in the Whites only pool. Johnnie Mae is an excellent swimmer. In other times, she would be the star of a swim team. Eventually, the city builds a pool for the Black residents, but the racist oppression is still strong. As I was finishing listening to this book, the national news ran a story on recently deceased Civil Rights Activist Mimi Jones who fought against Whites only pools. She and others were in a pool when a White man poured acid in the water.
This is a story about tearing down the walls of segregation and oppression one brick at a time. If the girls had been allowed in the pool, with life guards, Clara would still be alive.
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Story
In the fourth volume of her autobiography, The Heart of a Woman, Angelou's turbulent life breaks wide open with joy as the singer-dancer enters the razzle-dazzle of fabulous New York City. There, at the Harlem Writers Guild, her love for writing blazes anew. Her compassion and commitment lead her to respond to the fiery times by becoming the northern coordinator of Martin Luther King's history-making quest. A tempestuous, earthy woman, she promises her heart to one man only to have it stolen, virtually on her wedding day, by a passionate African freedom fighter.
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Ripoff - Summary of the Book
- By Raquel on 10-26-20
By: Maya Angelou
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Breath, Eyes, Memory
- By: Edwidge Danticat
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 6 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
At the age of 12, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished village of Croix-des-Rosets to New York, to be reunited with a mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti - to the women who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence in a novel that bears witness to the traditions, suffering, and wisdom of an entire people.
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Amazing Narrator
- By Luis on 04-03-16
By: Edwidge Danticat
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Back Roads
- By: Tawni O'Dell
- Narrated by: Andrew Eiden
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Harley Altmyer should be in college drinking Rolling Rock and chasing girls. He should be freed from his closed-minded, stricken coal town, with its lack of jobs and no sense of humor. Instead, he's constantly reminded of just how messed up his life is. With his mother in jail for killing his abusive father, Harley is an orphan with the responsibilities of an adult and the fiery, aggressive libido of a teenager.
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An unexpected twist
- By Leticia Porche on 01-02-20
By: Tawni O'Dell
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Tara Road
- A Novel
- By: Maeve Binchy
- Narrated by: Katherine Borowitz
- Length: 17 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Ria lived on Tara Road in Dublin with her dashing husband, Danny, and their two children. She fully believed she was happily married, right up until the day Danny told her he was leaving her to be with his young, pregnant girlfriend. By a chance phone call, Ria meets Marilyn, a woman from New England unable to come to terms with her only son's death and now separated from her husband. The two women exchange houses for the summer with extraordinary consequences, each learning that the other has a deep secret that can never be revealed.
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Material good - quality, not-so-much
- By B. W. on 09-05-08
By: Maeve Binchy
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The Reader
- By: Bernhard Schlink, Carol Janeway - translator
- Narrated by: Campbell Scott
- Length: 4 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When he falls ill on his way home from school, 15-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover--then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers more shameful than murder.
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Dysfunctional
- By Ella on 12-09-08
By: Bernhard Schlink, and others
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Mother of Pearl
- A Novel
- By: Melinda Haynes
- Narrated by: Nana Visitor
- Length: 16 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Mother of Pearl is populated by wonderfully rich and original characters. The paths of Even Grade, a black man who grew up an orphan, and Valuable Komer, a white girl who is the daughter of the town whore, cross through Joody Two Sun, a seer, who becomes Even's lover. Both Even and Valuable are seeking the family, love, and commitment they never had, and their search ultimately takes both of them to places they never dreamed they'd go.
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Narrator problem??
- By Nana on 06-23-11
By: Melinda Haynes
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I Know This Much Is True
- By: Wally Lamb
- Narrated by: Ken Howard
- Length: 5 hrs and 42 mins
- Abridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the long awaited follow-up to the highly praised novel She's Come Undone, Dominick Birdsey must come to terms with himself, as well as with the schizophrenic twin brother he has spent his life both protecting and resenting.
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Disappointing
- By Douglas on 03-20-08
By: Wally Lamb
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Midwives
- A Novel
- By: Chris Bohjalian
- Narrated by: Kate Burton
- Length: 4 hrs and 36 mins
- Abridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The time is 1981, and Sibyl Danforth has been a dedicated midwife in the rural community of Reddington, Vermont, for 15 years. But one treacherous winter night, in a house isolated by icy roads and failed telephone lines, Sibyl takes desperate measures to save a baby's life. She performs an emergency Caesarean section on its mother, who appears to have died in labor.
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Why Abridged
- By Patricia B Tripoli on 11-06-13
By: Chris Bohjalian
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Jewel
- By: Bret Lott
- Narrated by: Celia Weston
- Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins
- Abridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When Brenda Kay is born in 1943, Jewel gives thanks for a healthy baby, last-born and most welcome. Jewel is the story of how quickly a life can change; how, like lightning, an unforeseen event can set us on a course without reason or compass. In this story of a woman's devotion to the child who is both her burden and God's singular way of smiling on her, Bret Lott has created a mother-daughter relationship of matchless intensity and beauty, and one of the finest, most indomitable heroines in contemporary American fiction.
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Unnesesary & overuse of the phrase 'Nigga Women'
- By Ashley N. Wilkins on 04-18-18
By: Bret Lott
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While I Was Gone
- By: Sue Miller
- Narrated by: Blair Brown
- Length: 5 hrs
- Abridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the summer of 1968, Jo Becker ran out on the marriage and the life her parents wanted for her, and escaped - for one beautiful, idyllic year - into a life that was bohemian and romantic, living under an assumed name in a rambling group house in Cambridge. It was a time of limitless possibility, but it ended in a single instant when Jo returned home one night to find her best friend lying dead in a pool of blood on the living room floor. Now Jo has everything she's ever wanted. But when an old housemate settles in her small town, the fabric of Jo's life begins to unravel.
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Join the pity party.
- By Ann Barrette on 02-22-12
By: Sue Miller
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The Three Mrs. Greys
- By: Shelly Ellis
- Narrated by: Elle Cleviden
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Noelle. Diamond. Vanessa. Each woman believes she is Cyrus Grey’s only wife - until he’s nearly shot to death. Now, as he lies in a coma, the deceptions keep coming, unraveling everything they thought they knew.... Gorgeous model Noelle’s marriage to Cyrus anchored her - though she couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t have a baby with her. They certainly had the money. But she’s learning fast just how Cyrus became so rich - thanks to his fatally attractive business partner....
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Good Story but was cut short!
- By Roz on 07-29-21
By: Shelly Ellis
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Paradise
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 15 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In Paradise - her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain", assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void.
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MORRISON AT HER MOST COMPLEX
- By Kennedi Hill on 11-07-19
By: Toni Morrison
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She's Come Undone
- By: Wally Lamb
- Narrated by: Linda Stephens
- Length: 18 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Meet Dolores Price. She's 13, wise-mouthed but wounded, having bid her childhood goodbye. Beached like a whale in front of her bedroom TV, she spends the next few years nourishing herself with the Mallomars, potato chips, and Pepsi her anxious mother supplies. When she finally rolls into young womanhood at 257 pounds, Dolores is no stronger and life is no kinder. But this time she's determined to rise to the occasion and give herself one more chance before really going belly-up.
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Really disappointing narrator!
- By Jessica Williams on 01-21-12
By: Wally Lamb
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The Sweetness of Water (Oprah’s Book Club)
- A Novel
- By: Nathan Harris
- Narrated by: William DeMeritt
- Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the waning days of the Civil War, brothers Prentiss and Landry—freed by the Emancipation Proclamation—seek refuge on the homestead of George Walker and his wife, Isabelle. The Walkers, wracked by the loss of their only son to the war, hire the brothers to work their farm. Prentiss and Landry, meanwhile, plan to save money for the journey north and a chance to reunite with their mother, who was sold away when they were boys. Equal parts beauty and terror, The Sweetness of Water is an epic whose grandeur locates humanity and love amid the most harrowing circumstances.
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Metaphor OD
- By 2boyzmummy on 10-18-21
By: Nathan Harris