The Girls in the Stilt House

A Novel

By: Kelly Mustian

Narrated by: Johanna Parker

Length: 9 hrs and 56 mins

Publisher's summary

Murder breaks through the racial divide that separates two teenage girls, forging an unlikely friendship in this Southern debut that’s perfect for fans of Where the Crawdads Sing and If the Creek Don’t Rise.

Ada promised herself she would never go back to the Trace, to her unbearable life on the swamp, and to her harsh father in Mississippi. But now, after running away to Baton Rouge and briefly knowing a different kind of life, she finds herself with nowhere to go but back home. And she knows there will be a price to pay with her father.

Matilda, daughter of a sharecropper, is from the other side of the Trace. Doing what she can to protect her family from the whims and demands of some particularly callous locals is an ongoing struggle. She forms a plan to go north, to pack up the secrets she’s holding about her life in the South and hang them on the line for all to see.

As the two girls are drawn deeper into a dangerous world of bootleggers and moral corruption, they must come to terms with the complexities of their tenuous bond and a hidden past that links them in ways that could cost them their lives.

©2021 Kelly Mustian (P)2021 Blackstone Publishing

Not sure about the narrator.

I’m from Mississippi. The narrator’s overdone accent grated my nerves so bad I couldn’t finish this book when I originally downloaded it. Six months later I decided to play the book for background noise. It’s a great book. The author did a wonderful job portraying the injustice of the time.

Needs different narrator

This story would most likely have been more enjoyable with a different narrator. It took quite some time to get used to the narrator to be able to tolerate listening to the story. The overall story was decent though. A little long-winded at times, but I wanted to see how things ended.

Wonderful

Wow!! I loved everything about this book!! The narrator was wonderful. The characters were so real. I loved every minute!!

grabs you from the start

I loved the book. She wrote a great story and the landscape is painted perfectly.

Ada and Maltilda

I loved listening to this book. I have always been told to push through hardships, and that is what our two young ladies do.

The cadence of the narrator is horribly nauseating

This might be a great story but you'd never know it because the narrator has a strange cadence to her speech. It really seems as if she's faking a southern accent. It ruins the story.

Couldn’t listen to the book, bad cadence.

The narrator is hard to listen to. She has some odd inflections and pauses. Her voice is nice but I couldn’t focus on the story, the cadence of her speaking was distracting.

Horrible Narrator

The story seems interesting but couldn't finish it due to the horrible fake southern accent. Strongly recommend reading the book than listening to the audio book.

Story good, narration bad

Struggled to finish. The story hooked me, but the narrator's accent was annoying and distracting.

Good Story

I ended up speeding up the narration as the narrator was very difficult to listen to for me. I recommend reading the story.