Stay With Me

Annie Henk portrays Cece, an ambitious college-bound inner city student. Henk gives Cece a believable spark and conveys her conflicting emotions as, against her better judgment, she falls for Mack, a high school dropout who's done jail time. Narrator Mark Zeisler portrays Mack, conveying his kindness as well as his instability. Listeners will be as swept up with Cece and Mack as they are with each other, and when things begin to fall apart, it feels both inevitable and heart-wrenching. Griffin's strength is that he makes his characters, even minor ones, multidimensional, and Henk and Zeisler support that strength by creating distinct and rich voices. The story of opposites attracting is a common one, but this take is fresh and affecting. A.F. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine

October 10, 2011
In a narrative spanning 102 days, Mack and CéCe, co-workers at a restaurant and co-narrators of the story, are set up by CéCe's brother, Anthony, and slowly hit it off. CéCe is heartbroken when Anthony joins the army, leaving her alone with their alcoholic mother, whose condition Griffin (The Orange Houses) delicately conveys with profound emotion. Mack, whose mother left him with a bitter alcoholic father, is gentle with the dogs he trains, but he's mentally disturbedâpsychologically tormented by a hissing noise, "Like when you roll the radio to static and dial up the volume." When the hissing gets loud, generally as a reaction to injustice, Mack turns chillingly violent. As tension builds, readers will likely anticipate that this violence will ignite the conflict that brings Mack and CéCe's relationship to an end, but each step of that journey is authentic, painful, and heartfelt. Griffin's gift at giving voice to deeply flawed, disadvantaged characters without patronizing or oversimplifying their circumstances shines in this moving novel of loss, acceptance, and the possibility of redemption. Ages 14âup.