Confession: I can no longer read Sarah Dessen. By that I mean I can no longer hold the book open and read them; I need them read to me. Dessen’s style is so strong, begging to be read aloud, and I find that I have gotten much more out of her books as a listener than as a reader.
Just Listen is on one of the Illinois book awards lists this year, along with Along for the Ride, so I decided listen to it, since I had good luck with AftR as a listen.
Annabel’s life is falling apart — one of her sisters recently developed an eating disorder, her other sister has begun changing right before her eyes, and her very other best friend has turned her back on her — making this quite the year to be beginning school up again. She’s dreading it.
But that’s when she meets a boy who will change her mind about relationships and about herself. Owen, a guy she’s never paid much attention to, has suddenly made himself a huge part of her world. And yes, music plays a huge part in this story, so immediately, there is an appeal factor here.
Annabel and her sister are models, and Annabel wants to leave that world behind, but because she knows it pleases her mother so much, she doesn’t want to do it and upset mom. Dad’s a typical Dessen father — there but also not there in the story. In other words, not memorable.
Just Listen features Jennifer Ikeda as a reader, who I thought worked particularly well for Annabel’s voice. Ikeda is a little gruff, but not too much. She made Annabel realistic in the sense that she was going through a lot of challenges and looking for a lot of changes. Unfortunately, I found that her voice changed a few times throughout the audiobook, from higher pitched to lower pitched, to at times completely flat, and it was quite distracting. I remember at one point needing to flip back a track on the audio to make sure I was listening to Annabel narrate and not another character being voiced because the shift in her reading style changed so dramatically.
The audio is semi-voiced, which was nice. I liked Owen’s voicing here, as Ikeda did a great teen boy. Clark, Annabel’s first best friend, had a fantastic nasally voice, which was done flawlessly and believably by Ikeda. I feel like she did a great job of capturing not only Clark’s voice, but Annabel’s envisioning of Clark as a young person.
While Just Listen was not my favorite Dessen title, it was just as strong as her others. Fans of Dessen have already discovered this one, but this is a title that would appeal to fans of Natasha Friend (especially her issues books), Tara Kelly’s Harmonic Feedback (I was, in fact, reading them both at the same time and loved the parallel tales of music), and those who have yet to wet their feet in Dessen world. This might be an audio version to skip if you haven’t listened to a lot of audio, as the sound quality and editing challenges might be disappointing and tough to follow. But if you are a listener, this is something you can probably let slide.
Oh, and of course, at the end of the story the loose ends all come together, and there is nothing short of a satisfactory — if not entirely predicatable — conclusion.
