My Summer of Love and Misfortune

Narrator Nancy Wu's confident and girlish voice pulls listeners into Iris's dream world, in which weed, fashion, and Sephora are paramount. When Chinese-American Iris fails her senior year of high school, she is sent to visit family in Beijing. The opportunity to connect with her culture is challenging. Her difficulty is reflected in slow, deliberate pronunciation as Iris learns Chinese and in the indignant shouts of "What is wrong with you?" when locals are baffled at her clumsy attempts to speak the language. Iris's parents speak in stern tones; their accents are lighter than those of the Beijing family. Iris gasps and speaks in rushed, defensive tones when she's in trouble, and her cousin criticizes in harsh, clipped remarks. Wu perfectly paces her narration of Iris's journey to become a better person. A.L.C. � AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine