Sitting on Top of the World

By: Cheryl King

Narrated by: Whitney Dykhouse

Length: 6 hrs and 57 mins

Publisher's summary

Fourteen-year-old June Baker never in a million years thought she’d be dressing like a boy, sneaking into a hobo camp, and jumping onto a moving freight train to travel across the state of Tennessee.

But, that’s what she has to do to find work so her family’s farm can survive. It’s 1933, and the Great Depression is spreading misery throughout America. Where once June was sitting on top of the world, now she’s carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders. Once she was picking fruit from the pawpaw trees, and now she’s picking up the pieces of a family torn apart. Once she was climbing and falling from trees, and now she’s jumping from moving trains. June knows the risks. What she doesn’t know is that the railroad bull she’s falling for has a devastating secret that will change the course of her life.

Sitting on Top of the World is an audiobook that middle school and high school teachers can be proud to include in their classroom library or in reading instruction, and it is an audiobook that's loved by both teens and adults.

©2021 Cheryl King (P)2022 Cheryl King

Best historical fiction I've read this year

I listened to the audiobook version of Sitting on Top of the World. I was so drawn in by the story and Whitney Dykhouse's performance, that I finished the book in under 24 hours and was calling my friends to recommend it before my earbuds were out.

Spanning the whole of the Great Depression, it comes as no surprise that June Baker, the novel's teenage protagonist, faces horrifying loss alongside her family, friends, town, and country. She has to navigate adolescence, and all its complicated facets, while keeping her family afloat.

The story is brilliantly told by June in the first person, and her voice is nuanced. The innocence of a little girl delighted by marbles and whittling is overlaid by the responsibility she feels for her family. Ms. King does a wonderful job of balancing narrative and inner dialogue, and June's voice matures through the book. The use of idioms from the time felt genuine and natural, and it was easy to slip into a world where resources and hope were limited. It did not have the feel of the typical YA title, whether that was intentional or not, I'm not sure. I think it resonates betters as adult fiction.

In short, I loved this book. I found it at once heartwarming, inspiring, devastating, captivating, infuriating, and hopeful. Many thanks to Ms. King who so generously shared her book with me on Audible.

4 stars