Cousins Avery and Jax don't have much in common, including their feelings about a summer at their family's crumbling island vacation home. She thinks it's a great adventure, and he'd rather be anywhere else. Narrator Kate Coventry embodies Avery's open, exuberant, and sometimes thoughtless behavior, while Pete Cross makes clear to listeners how much quiet Jax is impacted by his father's overbearing nature. As they help clean the place up to sell it, they find pages torn from a diary that may uncover what drove their parents away from the island and each other years before. Cassandra Morris's brief narration of the mysterious diarist is compelling in its simplicity. Narrators Kate Coventry and Pete Cross provide vivacity to this exploration of family history and regrets.
(Mystery. 9-12)Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
Duration: 5 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9798225027049
Publisher: Scholastic Audiobooks
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
A not-too-scary horror audiobook.
Dan Bittner gives a polished performance of Stine’s middle-grade horror novel, narrating with melodramatic flair and dramatic pauses at the end of each cliffhanger chapter. When the Ferber family moves into a creepy old house on Nightmare Street, Joe’s parents are oblivious to the scary things happening in the house. In a parallel story, the Hannigan family moves into the same house, where Shawn has different creepy experiences. Both Joe and Shawn have nightmares in which they encounter horror tropes—headstones, a creepy rag doll, a looping camera, a ventriloquist’s dummy, and masked teachers—in their house and at school. Bittner’s pacing works well, and fans of the Goosebumps series will enjoy the familiar shivers and tongue-in-cheek humor.
A not-too-scary horror audiobook.Pub Date: April 18, 2026
Duration: 2 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9798228588288
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2026
Past and present come together seamlessly.
Casey Holloway and Emily Eiden perform alternating chapters of this audiobook about two girls connected through time. In the present day, 13-year-old Penny Marks is angry and resentful about her parents’ decision to move their family to Paris for her mother’s museum job. In 1943, 13-year-old Marie Bonnet and her sister live alone in Nazi-occupied Paris. Holloway depicts the curious, determined, artistic Penny, who pursues the mystery of a painting hidden in a wall and a letter written 80 years earlier. With an accented narration, Eiden reveals Marie’s entry into the French Resistance and her commitment to hiding French art from the Germans.
Past and present come together seamlessly. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
Duration: 6 hrs, 42 mins
DD ISBN: 9780063321816
Publisher: Harper Audio
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2026
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