TELL ME A SECRET AUDIOBOOK

I've always been an enormous fan of literature...I've never quite been able to get enough of the written word. Even when I was small enough to ride inside a shopping cart, I could never allow my mom leave the grocery store without first letting me grab a Little Golden Book.

The busier I get, though, the more intrigued I get by audiobooks. There's something kind of...old-school about getting your stories told to you. Kind of makes me think of families gathered around radios, in the pre-TV era.

So I was delighted when a copy of TELL ME A SECRET arrived, straight from the author herself. (Holly Cupala and I both released our debut novels in '10, and it was a joy to share all the nervous energy and the triumphs with her as our books moved through development.)

I already knew I loved TELL ME A SECRET; I read the novel when it released in '10. But the audiobook, which I listened to this past weekend, is a pleasure in itself. Just holding the audiobook gives you the same tactile pleasure that holding a new book provides—it's packaged beautifully. And there's something just so...delicious, really, about slowing a book down. Face it—most of us bookworms have learned to read on warp speed. But when a book is read aloud, the phrases get a chance to permeate in a completely new way. And Jenna Lamia, who narrates, is especially good with dialogue; the dialogue is acted, rather than simply read.

If you get a chance to get your hands on a copy of Cupala's TELL ME A SECRET audiobook, you absolutely should...and don't forget to mark your calendars for Cupala's sophomore novel, DON'T BREATHE A WORD, due out in January!

As for me, the listening experience was so enjoyable, I'm going to gravitate toward more audiobooks in the future.

...How about you? What's your experience with audiobooks? How do you think they stack up to the printed page?