Kitten Audiobook by Stacey Yu— narrated by Annie Q. Riegel

Why the audiobook wins

Annie Q. Riegel narrates Kitten in the flat, unbothered first person the novel runs on, and that register is harder to hold than it sounds. Katie describes her own life the way somebody reads a weather report for a country they do not live in. Play it too dry and it goes lifeless; play it too knowing and every joke turns into a wink. Riegel keeps it level, so the panic underneath surfaces in what Katie declines to say.

Audio suits a book with almost no plot machinery. Voice is the whole engine here, and spoken aloud, Katie's avoidance becomes audible: the subject changes, the sentences that stop a beat early, the enthusiasm she saves entirely for a cat and spends nowhere else. Seven hours and forty-three minutes is two evenings, and the novel is better taken in long stretches than a chapter at a time.

The mother exists mostly as an absence and a handful of remembered lines, and those are the passages where the recording stops being funny and starts to hurt. One Audible credit, under eight hours, and a debut that will start an argument in any book club that takes it on.