Warrior Girl Unearthed

"It’s the same narrator and listening to this one it felt like she became this other character. This book is also set on Sugar Island, ten years after Firekeeper’s Daughter . The main character from that story is this main character’s aunt, so she’s still there as part of the story and it’s nice getting to see how she fits in as Aunt Daunis. This main character is Perry Firekeeper-Birch, who is 16 and Black and Ojibwe. I really liked how she was such a strong-willed character. And I liked seeing how she was somebody who didn’t really care about school, but cared about the things that were important to her. The idea of repatriating their ancestors and their belongings became really important to her and that was a beautiful thing to see. It was reminding me of stories you hear about kids who, for example, don’t like reading at all until they find something that actually they relate to. Perry Firekeeper-Birch is considered not a great student, but she is the best of her friends at speaking their language and knows so much about the folklore and history and so many different aspects of their culture. She is definitely somebody who will be carrying that forward and fighting for their community. I was so happy to get to read this one. It was definitely the same mix of a coming of age story, but also a lot of adventure and some heavier storylines, for sure. She’s such a strong character, it was great getting to spend time with her. She is such a fighter. And there were parts of it that took me by surprise, some good plot twists. I appreciate reading Young Adult literature for so many reasons, but sometimes it’s nice to remember that they usually figure things out in a good way by the end, as opposed to some adult thrillers where you are left feeling a little bit bereft. It was great hearing the narrator narrating in Ojibwe, and getting to hear the language out loud. Again, one of the great things about audiobooks is that not only are they translating all these emotions on the page for you, but you’re also sometimes getting to hear different languages than the ones you speak. You get to hear them come alive in the narrator’s voice and I think that’s a beautiful thing. So many more great audiobooks, I’m sure, will be coming out. I’m excited to hear more adaptations of graphic novels and illustrated books coming to audio. One of the audiobooks we didn’t talk about today is Sunshine by Jarrett J. Krosoczka, which is a graphic memoir for Young Adults that he also released as an audiobook. It’s about his experience going to a camp for terminally ill children and seriously ill children in Maine, and the week he spent as a counsellor at that camp and the impact it had on his life. He also wrote Hey, Kiddo , a memoir. Jarrett J. Krosoczka obviously has a good grasp of how to turn all of his illustrations into audio. We have a great interview with him that I’d recommend listening to on our podcast, where he talks about the process and how you go about turning something that’s so visual into an audio experience. Sunshine won in a new category for us: audio originals, which either originally came out in audio or are highly adapted audio works. It is another example of a great adaptation where so much thought and care goes into narrating each of the different characters and all the sounds you hear, to help you understand what’s happening in each picture. So as we learn more about how to turn visual media into audio, I’m excited to see more of those coming out, I think it will be really fun."