Booklist Editors' Choice: Media

This engaging CD pays tribute to twentieth-century blues and ragtime music through 17 tunes performed by Randy Kaplan, whose bantering between songs with gravelly-voiced “Delta denizen” Lightnin’ Bodkins is wryly humorous and invigorating.

A terrific ensemble cast, including de Ocampo, MacLeod Andrews, Justine Eyre, and Amy Rubinate, reads Fleming’s creepy stories in which teenage ghosts, who lived in Chicago from the late nineteenth century to modern times, tell how they died.

Hubbard’s well-framed and exquisitely paced debut novel, set at an all-boys boarding school, is read with compassion and sincerity by Boyer, who voices a range of characters, including first-person narrator Alex, who witnesses his friend’s drowning during a night of underage drinking.

Ragtime piano riffs, realistic sound effects, and Graham’s silky-smooth reading complement Cline-Ransome’s story of Leroy “Satchel” Paige, the first Negro League player inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Narrators de Ocampo and Entwistle bring the stories of half-siblings Andi and Bernardo to listeners’ ears through distinctive voices and accents (British and Spanish). Bernardo leaves his native Philippines, where he is a folk-hero giant, to reunite with his mother and pint-size, basketball-crazy Andi, in London.

Steele portrays 10-year-old Auggie, whose face is severely deformed because of a genetic disorder, with a raspy voice and self-deprecating humor; Nick Podehl channels Auggie’s friends and others; and Kate Rudd reflects Auggie’s teen sister in this compelling debut novel.