“Such a Fun Age”: Kily Reid’s remarkable first novel presents 25-year-old Emira Tucker, college-educated but utterly at sea about what to do with her life. Emira, who is African American, is working as a babysitter for the Chamberlains, a wealthy white couple in Philadelphia:. At the couple’s request, Emira takes the couple’s 3-year old daughter to an upscale grocery store late at night, where she is accused of kidnapping the child. The confrontation, finally dissolved when the father arrives, is filmed by a stranger who wants her to post the clearly racist incident on social media. Horrified, Emira, who is a private person, persuades the young man to delete the video, though he insists on sending it to her phone. In time Emira and the videographer become a couple — though with growing complications. That’s the setup — and out of it comes a disturbing but witty tale of oblivious privilege, self-congratulatory racial acceptance and an engrossing plot with surprising twists. (Penguin Audio, Unabridged, 10 hours)
“Uncanny Valley”: Anna Wiener worked an underpaid job in a New York literary agency, until, looking for a salary she could live on, she moved to a start-up developing an e-reader. Let go for being “too interested in learning, not doing,” she moved to Silicon Valley where, at 25, she found something close to an alien life form: men younger than her running multimillion-dollar start-ups, software and entrepreneurial gurus who, looking through a lens of algorithm, saw human beings as entities made up of measurable, manipulatable elements. Their aim, it struck her, was to create a “world of actionable metrics, in which developers would never stop optimizing and users would never stop looking at their screens.”In her memoir, Wiener writes with real wit about this milieu, and, less amusingly, about soaring rents, the transformation of American sensibilities, and her own increasing sense that she was playing a part in creating a world she did not like. (Macmillan, Unabridged, 8¾ hours)
“American Dirt”: Jeanine Cummins’ controversial novel begins at a family party in Acapulco with Lydia and her 8-year-old son, Luca, hiding in terror as cartel assassins kill the 16 other guests. Among them is Lydia’s husband, a journalist, who had written a hard-hitting article on the cartel boss. Fearing for their lives, mother and child begin a terrifying journey to find refuge with a relative in the United States, proceeding by foot and on the boxcars of “La Bestia” with other migrants. Treachery, robbery, extortion, violence, deprivation and deadly pursuit by the all-seeing cartel’s henchmen mark the trip, but so does unexpected kindness and friendship with two teenage Honduran sisters fleeing gang exploitation and rape. Cummins, who has been at the center of a literary storm, reads her own afterword and Mexican actor Yareli Arizmendi delivers the body of this suspenseful story. (Macmillan, Unabridged, 17 hours)
— Katherine Powers, The Washington Post
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