Africaville
A Novel
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Africaville
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Narrated by:
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Robin Miles
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By:
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Jeffrey Colvin
About this listen
A ferociously talented writer makes his stunning debut with this richly woven tapestry, set in a small Nova Scotia town settled by former slaves, that depicts several generations of one family bound together and torn apart by blood, faith, time, and fate.
Vogue: Best Books to Read This Winter
Structured as a triptych, Africaville chronicles the lives of three generations of the Sebolt family - Kath Ella, her son Omar/Etienne, and her grandson Warner - whose lives unfold against the tumultuous events of the 20th century from the Great Depression of the 1930s, through the social protests of the 1960s to the economic upheavals in the 1980s.
A century earlier, Kath Ella’s ancestors established a new home in Nova Scotia. Like her ancestors, Kath Ella’s life is shaped by hardship - she struggles to conceive and to provide for her family during the long, bitter Canadian winters. She must also contend with the locals’ lingering suspicions about the dark-skinned “outsiders” who live in their midst.
Kath Ella’s fierce love for her son, Omar, cannot help her overcome the racial prejudices that linger in this remote, tight-knit place. As he grows up, the rebellious Omar refutes the past and decides to break from the family, threatening to upend all that Kath Ella and her people have tried to build. Over the decades, each successive generation drifts further from Africaville, yet they take a piece of this indelible place with them as they make their way to Montreal, Vermont, and beyond, to the deep South of America.
As it explores notions of identity, passing, cross-racial relationships, the importance of place, and the meaning of home, Africaville tells the larger story of the black experience in parts of Canada and the United States. Vibrant and lyrical, filled with colorful details, and told in a powerful, haunting voice, this extraordinary novel - as atmospheric and steeped in history as The Known World, Barracoon, The Underground Railroad, and The Twelve Tribes of Hattie - is a landmark work from a sure-to-be major literary talent.
©2019 Jeffrey Colvin (P)2019 HarperAudioListeners also enjoyed...
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- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,189
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,021
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,013
In 1961, Sarah M. Broom’s mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant - the postwar optimism seemed assured. A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America’s most mythologized cities.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great book. I wish the pictures had been included.
- By Lindsay on 02-28-20
By: Sarah M. Broom
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Charms for the Easy Life
- By: Kaye Gibbons
- Narrated by: Kate Fleming
- Length: 6 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 108
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 101
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Story4 out of 5 stars 100
A family without men, the Birches live gloriously offbeat lives in the lush, green backwoods of North Carolina. Radiant, headstrong Sophia and her shy, brilliant daughter, Margaret, possess powerful charms to ward off loneliness, despair, and the human misery that often beats a path to their door. And they are protected by the eccentric wisdom and muscular love of the remarkable matriarch Charlie Kate, a solid, uncompromising, self-taught healer who treats everything from boils to broken bones to broken hearts.
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5 out of 5 stars
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So Lovely!
- By Doodle slave on 01-04-17
By: Kaye Gibbons
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Who Is Vera Kelly?
- By: Rosalie Knecht
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 181
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 157
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 156
New York City, 1962. Vera Kelly is struggling to make rent and blend into the underground gay scene in Greenwich Village. She's working night shifts at a radio station when her quick wits, sharp tongue, and technical skills get her noticed by a recruiter for the CIA. Next thing she knows she's in Argentina, tasked with wiretapping a congressman and infiltrating a group of student activists in Buenos Aires. When a betrayal leaves her stranded in the wake of a coup, Vera learns the Cold War makes for strange and unexpected bedfellows.
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2 out of 5 stars
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not a whole lot of spycraft just a good story
- By Kirra Krussman on 01-19-19
By: Rosalie Knecht
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Saints for All Occasions
- A Novel
- By: J. Courtney Sullivan
- Narrated by: Susan Denaker
- Length: 15 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 733
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 643
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Story4 out of 5 stars 646
Nora and Theresa Flynn are 21 and 17 when they leave their small village in Ireland and journey to America. Nora is the responsible sister; she's shy and serious and engaged to a man she isn't sure that she loves. Theresa is gregarious; she is thrilled by their new life in Boston and besotted with the fashionable dresses and dance halls on Dudley Street. But when Theresa ends up pregnant, Nora is forced to come up with a plan - a decision with repercussions they are both far too young to understand.
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3 out of 5 stars
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The narration ruined it
- By Janis Reynolds on 06-12-17
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My Father's Paradise
- A Son's Search For His Family's Past
- By: Ariel Sabar
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 46
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 40
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 40
In a remote corner of the world, forgotten for nearly 3,000 years, lived an enclave of Kurdish Jews so isolated that they still spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Mostly illiterate, they were self-made mystics and gifted storytellers and humble peddlers who dwelt in harmony with their Muslim and Christian neighbors in the mountains of northern Iraq. To these descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Yona Sabar was born.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great story, poorly narrated
- By Oren Kessler on 09-10-24
By: Ariel Sabar
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The Godmothers
- A Novel
- By: Camille Aubray
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan, Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 13 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 755
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 671
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 665
Meet the Godmothers: Filomena is a clever and resourceful war refugee with a childhood secret, who comes to America to wed Mario, the family's favored son. Amie, a beautiful and dreamy French girl from upstate New York, escapes an abusive husband after falling in love with Johnny, the oldest of the brothers. Lucy, a tough-as-nails Irish nurse, ran away from a strict girls' home and marries Frankie, the sensuous middle son. And the glamorous Petrina, the family's only daughter, graduates with honors from Barnard College despite a past trauma that nearly caused a family scandal.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Easy Enjoyable Read
- By Bunny on 06-23-21
By: Camille Aubray
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The Jew Store
- A Family Memoir
- By: Stella Suberman
- Narrated by: Donna Postel
- Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 77
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 71
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 71
In 1920, in small-town America, the ubiquitous dry goods store was usually owned by Jews and often referred to as "the Jew store". That's how Stella Suberman's father's store, Bronson's Low-Priced Store, in Concordia, Tennessee, was known locally. The Bronsons were the first Jews to ever live in that tiny town of one main street, one bank, one drugstore, one picture show, one feed and seed, one hardware, one barber shop, one beauty parlor, one blacksmith, and many Christian churches.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Wonderful
- By Susan simpson on 09-04-21
By: Stella Suberman
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The Good Friday Murder
- A Christine Bennett Mystery, Book 1
- By: Lee Harris
- Narrated by: Dee Macaluso
- Length: 6 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 71
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 61
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 62
Christine Bennett has left the cloistered world of nuns for the profane world of New York State, where murder and madness are often linked. At a town meeting, Christine volunteers to investigate a 40-year-old murder case long since closed. Now she'll move heaven and earth to exonerate a pair of retarded savant twins, now senior citizens, of their mother's murder on Good Friday in 1950.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Polite procedural cozy
- By connie on 12-29-12
By: Lee Harris
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Bettyville
- By: George Hodgman
- Narrated by: Jeff Woodman
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 371
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 332
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Story4 out of 5 stars 332
When George Hodgman leaves Manhattan for his hometown of Paris, Missouri, he finds himself - an unlikely caretaker and near-lethal cook - in a head-on collision with his aging mother, Betty, a woman of wit and will. Will George lure her into assisted living? When hell freezes over. He can't bring himself to force her from the home both treasure - the place where his father's voice lingers, the scene of shared jokes, skirmishes, and, behind the dusty antiques, a rarely acknowledged conflict...
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1 out of 5 stars
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Title Should Be Georgeville-It's All About George
- By Sara on 10-08-15
By: George Hodgman
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The Lions of Fifth Avenue
- A Novel
- By: Fiona Davis
- Narrated by: Erin Bennett, Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 10 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 3,378
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 2,920
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 2,913
It's 1913, and on the surface, Laura Lyons couldn't ask for more out of life - her husband is the superintendent of the New York Public Library, allowing their family to live in an apartment within the grand building, and they are blessed with two children. But headstrong, passionate Laura wants more, and when she takes a leap of faith and applies to the Columbia Journalism School, her world is cracked wide open.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Exhilarating
- By Joanna Butler on 08-20-20
By: Fiona Davis
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After Visiting Friends
- A Son's Story
- By: Michael Hainey
- Narrated by: Dan John Miller
- Length: 8 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 99
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 82
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 83
Michael Hainey had just turned six when his uncle knocked on his family's back door one morning with the tragic news: Bob Hainey, Michael's father, was found alone near his car on Chicago's North Side, dead, of an apparent heart attack. Thirty-five years old, a young assistant copy desk chief at the Chicago Sun-Times, Bob was a bright and shining star in the competitive, hard-living world of newspapers, one that involved booze-soaked nights that bled into dawn. And then suddenly he was gone.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Son's Search for Father Brings on Self-knowledge
- By sheila kehoe on 08-15-13
By: Michael Hainey
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Joy in the Morning
- A Novel
- By: Betty Smith
- Narrated by: Maggi-Meg Reed
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 105
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 93
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 92
In 1927, in Brooklyn, New York, Carl Brown and Annie McGairy meet and fall in love. Though only 18, Annie travels alone halfway across the country to the Midwestern university where Carl is studying law - and there they marry. But Carl and Annie’s first year together is much more difficult than they anticipated as they find themselves in a faraway place with little money and few friends. With hardship and poverty weighing heavily upon them, they come to realize that their greatest sources of strength, loyalty, and love will help them make it through.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Another Wonderful Betty Smith Audio Book
- By 20eagle16 on 01-25-21
By: Betty Smith
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One True Thing
- By: Anna Quindlen
- Narrated by: Christina Moore
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 579
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 464
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 464
A young woman sits in jail, accused of the mercy killing of her dying mother. She didn't do it, but she thinks she knows who did. In the last months of her life, Ellen Gulden's mother revealed startling secrets that challenged everything Ellen believed about her family. Now, in jail, Ellen believes those secrets will tell her who had the courage to end her mother's suffering.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Quindlen's writing skills shine in One True Thing.
- By Bonny on 08-26-13
By: Anna Quindlen
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The Shadow Lines
- By: Amitav Ghosh
- Narrated by: Raj Varma
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 87
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 68
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Story4 out of 5 stars 67
Opening in Calcutta in the 1960s, Ghosh’s radiant second novel follows two families - one English, one Bengali - as their lives intertwine in tragic and comic ways. The narrator, Indian-born and English educated, traces events back and forth in time, through years of Bengali partition and violence, observing the ways in which political events invade private lives.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Narrator Doesn't Know How to Pronounce
- By Amazon Customer on 08-27-11
By: Amitav Ghosh
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The Parted Earth
- By: Anjali Enjeti
- Narrated by: Deepti Gupta
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 112
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 98
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 99
Spanning more than half a century and cities from New Delhi to Atlanta, Anjali Enjeti’s debut is a heartfelt and human portrait of the long shadow of the partition of the Indian subcontinent on the lives of three generations.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Riveting
- By MSE on 05-14-21
By: Anjali Enjeti
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The Final Victim
- By: Wendy Corsi Staub
- Narrated by: Emily Cauldwell
- Length: 12 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 77
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 68
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 66
Everyone in Savannah, Georgia knows the Remington estate. The rambling old house bears blatant testimony not just to the esteemed family's vast wealth, but to unbearable tragedy and whispered secrets. Soon, the Remington's will all come home to this secluded plantation nestled deep in the shadow of moss-covered trees. Then they will have to die...one by one... For Charlotte Remington Maitland, the past five years have been a haze of pain and loss.
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4 out of 5 stars
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As always great story
- By Corinna on 04-28-22
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Lone Stars
- By: Justin Deabler
- Narrated by: Michael Crouch
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 27
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 26
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Story4 out of 5 stars 26
Lone Stars follows the arc of four generations of a Texan family in a changing America. Julian Warner, a father at last, wrestles with a question his husband posed: what will you tell our son about the people you came from, now that they're gone? Finding the answers takes Julian back in time to Eisenhower's immigration border raids, an epistolary love affair during the Vietnam War, crumbling marriages, queer migrations to Cambridge and New York, up to the disorienting polarization of Obama's second term.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Read for bookclub but fell in Love
- By Ericka Lawson on 09-11-22
By: Justin Deabler
What listeners say about Africaville
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Happydog
- 12-02-20
Hard to follow and understand what happened
hard to follow and understand what happened or is happening. good story to understand segregation and how these people often feel.
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Overall1 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- Amazon Customer
- 12-17-19
Waste of Time
I tried to like this book but the author gave me nothing to work with. None of the characters made me "feel" anything. Nobody was likeable. They weren't hateable either. They were all just "there". Things happened at the end of a chapter that you thought would create some drama and then in the next chapter the story had just moved on. Maybe it had even jumped years ahead. This was a very dry book with a boring tone to it and served no purpose.
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1 person found this helpful
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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
- S. Clay
- 02-23-20
Beautifully believable
As an amateur genealogist and African American history buff I appreciated the following the stories of these families and putting the generational puzzle pieces together. The characters were well developed and beautifully believable.
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2 people found this helpful
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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
- Monica G. Rivera Mindt
- 01-05-20
Beautiful Book
This is a unique and beautiful saga that spans generations, and takes place across Canada and the U.S. It provides a glimpse into a culture that I never knew existed, but found fascinating. This is a must read.
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2 people found this helpful