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The Birds of Opulence
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 4 hrs and 50 mins
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The Birds of Opulence
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Publisher's summary
From the critically acclaimed, award-winning author of Blackberries, Blackberries and Water Street comes an astonishing new novel. A lyrical exploration of love and loss, The Birds of Opulence centers on several generations of women in a bucolic Southern Black township as they live with and sometimes surrender to madness.
The Goode-Brown family, led by matriarch and pillar of the community Minnie Mae, is plagued by old secrets and embarrassment over mental illness and illegitimacy. Meanwhile, single mother Francine Clark is haunted by her dead, lightning-struck husband and forced to fight against both the moral judgment of the community and her own rebellious daughter, Mona. The residents of Opulence struggle with vexing relationships to the land, to one another, and to their own sexuality. As the members of the youngest generation watch their mothers and grandmothers pass away, they live with the fear of going mad themselves and must fight to survive.
Crystal Wilkinson offers up Opulence and its people in lush, poetic detail. It is a world of magic, conjuring, signs, and spells, but also of harsh realities that only love - and love that's handed down - can conquer. At once tragic and hopeful, this captivating novel is a story about another time, rendered for our own.
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- By: Eleanor Henderson
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 17 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 82
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 69
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Story4 out of 5 stars 68
Cotton County, Georgia, 1930: In a house full of secrets, two babies - one light-skinned, the other dark - are born to Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper's daughter. Accused of her rape, field hand Genus Jackson is lynched and dragged behind a truck down the Twelve-Mile Straight, the road to the nearby town. In the aftermath, the farm's inhabitants are forced to contend with their complicity in a series of events that left a man dead and a family irrevocably fractured.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great read!
- By S. Clay on 11-01-17
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Promise
- A Novel
- By: Minrose Gwin
- Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
- Length: 12 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 64
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 59
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Story4 out of 5 stars 59
In the aftermath of a devastating tornado that rips through the town of Tupelo, Mississippi, at the height of the Great Depression, two women worlds apart - one Black, one White; one a great-grandmother, the other a teenager - fight for their families' survival in this lyrical and powerful novel.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Mostly Disappointing
- By Anjoli on 06-15-19
By: Minrose Gwin
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The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove
- A Novel
- By: Susan Gregg Gilmore
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 7 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 53
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 43
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Story4 out of 5 stars 44
Bezellia Grove was born into the most prominent of Nashville families, but that didn’t stop her from having an alcoholic mother and a distant, adulterous father. Her nanny, Maizelle, and Nathaniel, the handyman, are the people who have taken care of her since she can remember. She considers them family, but her parents just consider them servants because they are Black. When Bezellia has a clandestine romance with Nathaniel's son, Whites and Blacks unite in fury at the young couple.
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4 out of 5 stars
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light southern fiction
- By suzanne on 02-08-13
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Memphis
- A Novel
- By: Tara M. Stringfellow
- Narrated by: Karen Murray, Adenrele Ojo, Tara Stringfellow
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 778
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 692
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 691
Summer 1995: Ten-year-old Joan, her mother, and her younger sister flee her father’s explosive temper and seek refuge at her mother’s ancestral home in Memphis. This is not the first time violence has altered the course of the family’s trajectory. Half a century earlier, Joan’s grandfather built this majestic house in the historic Black neighborhood of Douglass—only to be lynched days after becoming the first Black detective in the city. Joan tries to settle into her new life, but family secrets cast a longer shadow than any of them expected.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Awful narrator
- By Rachael edwards on 06-07-22
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The Last Carolina Girl
- By: Meagan Church
- Narrated by: Susan Bennett
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 106
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 97
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 97
For fourteen-year-old Leah Payne, life in her beloved coastal Carolina town is worlds away from the harsh realities of the day. Loyal to her lumberjack father, she knows only of the familiarity of her small community, the magic of the natural world, and the creative intuition that prompts her to march to the beat of her own drum. But when an accident takes her father's life, leaving her an orphan, Leah finds herself cast into a family of strangers whose welcoming façade hides a terrible secret.
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5 out of 5 stars
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WOW
- By Savannah Brown on 06-10-23
By: Meagan Church
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Walking the Choctaw Road
- Stories from Red People Memory
- By: Tim Tingle
- Narrated by: Tim Tingle
- Length: 3 hrs and 38 mins
- Abridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 45
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 38
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Story5 out of 5 stars 38
In Walking the Choctaw Road, Tim Tingle reaches far back into tribal memory to offer a deeply personal collection of stories woven from the supernatural, mythical, historical, and oral accounts of Choctaw people living today.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Authentic Story Telling!
- By Cara on 01-17-13
By: Tim Tingle
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The Star Side of Bird Hill
- By: Naomi Jackson
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 87
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 79
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Story4 out of 5 stars 79
Two sisters, ages 10 and 16, are exiled from Brooklyn to Bird Hill in Barbados, after their mother can no longer care for them. The young Phaedra and her older sister, Dionne, live, for the summer of 1989, with their grandmother, Hyacinth, a midwife and practitioner of the local spiritual practice of obeah. Dionne spends the summer in search of love, testing her grandmother's limits, and wanting to go home. Phaedra explores Bird Hill, where her family has lived for generations.
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5 out of 5 stars
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My absolute favorite book of all time
- By Eme on 07-16-15
By: Naomi Jackson
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The Past Is Never
- A Novel
- By: Tiffany Quay Tyson
- Narrated by: Devon Sorvari
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 63
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 59
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Story4 out of 5 stars 58
Siblings Bert, Willet, and Pansy know better than to go swimming at the old rock quarry. According to their father, it's the Devil's place, a place that's been cursed and forgotten. But Mississippi Delta summer days are scorching hot, and they can't resist cooling off in the dark, bottomless water - until the day six-year-old Pansy vanishes...not drowned, not lost, simply gone. When their father disappears as well, Bert and Willet leave their childhoods behind to try and hold their broken family together.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Intriguing Southern gothic tale
- By Robert Jason on 03-11-20
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I Will Send Rain
- A Novel
- By: Rae Meadows
- Narrated by: Emily Sutton-Smith
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 49
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 47
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Story4 out of 5 stars 47
Annie Bell can't escape the dust. It's in her hair, covering the windowsills, coating the animals in the barn, and in the corners of her children's dry, cracked lips. It's 1934, and the Bell farm in Mulehead, Oklahoma, is struggling as the earliest storms of the Dust Bowl descend. The wheat harvests are drying out, and people are packing up their belongings as storms lay waste to the Great Plains.
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5 out of 5 stars
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We've seen pictures of the Dust Bowl
- By Henwhisperer on 10-12-16
By: Rae Meadows
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Sugar
- By: Bernice L. McFadden
- Narrated by: Myra Lucretia Taylor
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,355
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 1,184
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,178
Sugar arrives in the small town of Bigelow, Arkansas, like an ominous storm. She saunters down the street in a blonde wig and spiked heels, cigarette dangling between red-painted lips. Without even speaking to her, the women in town hate her. But when she moves in next door to Pearl, a woman who tragically lost her daughter 15 years earlier, the two women bond over tragic pasts.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Wow wow wow
- By brenda transon on 08-27-19
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The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender
- By: Leslye Walton
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 447
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 401
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Story4 out of 5 stars 399
Magical realism, lyrical prose, and the pain and passion of human love haunt this hypnotic generational saga. Foolish love appears to be the Roux family birthright, an ominous forecast for its most recent progeny, Ava Lavender.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Beautiful and Haunting Fairytale
- By FanB14 on 07-24-15
By: Leslye Walton
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The Garden of Happy Endings
- A Novel
- By: Barbara O'Neal
- Narrated by: Tanya Eby
- Length: 12 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 128
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 112
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 112
In Barbara O’Neal’s novel of hope and renewal, two very different sisters discover that life is like a garden: Tend to it daily, nourish it with patience and optimism, and then watch the beauty unfold. After tragedy shatters her small community in Seattle, the Reverend Elsa Montgomery has a crisis of faith. Returning to her hometown of Pueblo, Colorado, she seeks work in a local soup kitchen. Preparing nourishing meals for folks in need, she keeps her hands busy while her heart searches for understanding. Meanwhile, her sister, Tamsin, as colorful as Elsa is unadorned and steadfast, finds her perfect life shattered when she learns that her husband is a criminal.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Spiritually Stunted
- By Dina on 01-28-14
By: Barbara O'Neal
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Godshot
- A Novel
- By: Chelsea Bieker
- Narrated by: Lauren Ezzo
- Length: 11 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 177
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 159
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Story4 out of 5 stars 159
Drought has settled on the town of Peaches, California. The area of the Central Valley where fourteen-year-old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother live was once an agricultural paradise. Now it's an environmental disaster, a place of cracked earth and barren raisin farms. In their desperation, residents have turned to a cult leader named Pastor Vern for guidance. He promises, through secret "assignments," to bring the rain everybody is praying for.
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4 out of 5 stars
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flawless novel, not the best narration
- By Adrienne on 05-05-20
By: Chelsea Bieker
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Running on Red Dog Road
- And Other Perils of an Appalachian Childhood
- By: Drema Hall Berkheimer
- Narrated by: Bailey Carr
- Length: 6 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 184
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 155
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Story4 out of 5 stars 156
Gypsies, faith-healers, moonshiners, and snake handlers weave through Drema's childhood in 1940s Appalachia after her father is killed in the coal mines, her mother goes off to work as a Rosie the Riveter, and she is left in the care of devout Pentecostal grandparents. What follows is a spitfire of a memoir that feels like a novel with intrigue, sweeping emotion, and indisputable charm. Drema's coming of age is colored by tent revivals with Grandpa, poetry-writing hobos, and traveling carnivals, and through it all, she serves witness to a multi-generational family.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Narrator’s attempt at a southern accent distracting to story
- By Ryan C. Bango on 01-05-22
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Nothing with Strings
- NPR's Beloved Holiday Stories
- By: Bailey White
- Narrated by: Lorna Raver
- Length: 4 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 58
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 42
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 43
The mundane and the miraculous stand side by side in these sketches and stories of Southern small-time life by the author of Quite a Year for Plums.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A real jewel.
- By Mary on 12-31-08
By: Bailey White
What listeners say about The Birds of Opulence
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- D. White
- 01-04-22
Opulent
Masterful and Elegant. Sopping with culture, honesty and remembrance of home. Lexington Kentucky 💙 Ohio St Native
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- George Hovis
- 06-13-23
A master storyteller
Crystal Wilkinson continues to amaze me sentence by sentence. The story of these women and of the man who came to love them, unforgettable!
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