Reading.is.your.destiny

❄️📖FIVE STAR AUDIOBOOK REVIEW📖❄️

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🥰Huge thank you to @macmillan.audio and @celadonbooks for the gifted copies!

📖Title: Penitence
✍️Author: @kristinkovalwriter
📅Pub Date: January 28, 2025
🗣️Audiobook Narrator: Thérèse Plummer
⏳Audiobook Length: 12 hrs, 13 mins

❄️Wow- this book absolutely blew me away. I’m adding this to my list of mind-blowing debuts. This is a perfect example of why debut books excite me so much! This is the exact kind of book that I want to read, but finding an author capable of writing family dramas with this level of reality and depth is so rare. Kristin Koval just became an instant auto-read author for me!

💔I can’t even begin to describe how well Koval captured so much of the human experience in this book. You can read the synopsis to see what the book is about on a surface level, but on deeper level this book is about everything that makes us human: relationships, fear, trauma, healing, redemption, forgiveness, anger, love, etc. etc. It’s impossible to even put into words what Koval accomplished here.

❄️As always, when there is a beautiful character-driven literary fiction/family drama story that also can be categorized as a mystery, there will be people that will go in expecting a mystery or a thrilling “gotcha” moment and be disappointed that “nothing happened”. I can already see this happening and BEG you to go into this book with an open mind and try to take it out of a nice and tidy “genre box”. In my opinion, the best books don’t fit perfectly into a single genre because they are so much MORE than what is typically expected from a certain genre. In this case, this book is more than a genre label could give describe.

🎧This audiobook was 12 hours, but while I was listening to it it felt like no time passed at all because I was literally hanging on every word these character’s spoke. The characters are messy people, many of them making terribly messed up choices, but I was so invested in what was happening to each and every one of them the entire time.

❄️This book took me through such a wide range of emotions, so be prepared to feel everything from horror, sadness, disappointment, excitement, hope, and healing.

⚠️The book is called Penitence which is literally defined as “the action of feeling or showing sorrow and regret for having done wrong; repentance.” So be aware that there are some HEAVY HEAVY HEAVY things in this book that may be extremely upsetting for readers. If you have concerns, check CW.

🎧As far as the audiobook itself, Thérèse Plummer was absolutely the perfect choice. She read with such emotion, it didn’t feel like reading or even acting, it felt like she truly was one with the book. I absolutely recommend the audiobook version if possible!