Ghost Summer

Stories

By: Tananarive Due

Narrated by: Tananarive Due, Robin Miles, Janina Edwards

Length: 13 hrs and 7 mins

Publisher's summary

Whether weaving family life and history into dark fiction or writing speculative Afrofuturism, American Book Award winner and Essence best-selling author Tananarive Due’s work is both riveting and enlightening. In her debut collection of short fiction, Due takes us to Gracetown, a small Florida town that has both literal and figurative ghost; into future scenarios that seem all too real; and provides empathetic portraits of those whose lives are touched by otherness. Featuring an award-winning novella and 15 stories, Ghost Summer: Stories is sure to both haunt and delight.

©2015 Tananarive Due (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing

Great Anthogy Book

This was great, I love the persepctive and how the author used plausible scenarios, outlandish and even cultuaral influences for the different stories and the fact that they are all sort of connected in a way. how? give it a listen.

Perfect spooky season listening

-feels like a grown up version of Goosebumps, short stories about random potential horrors. There’s ghosts, voodoo, zombies, cloning, plagues. Some stories are more heavy than others.
-very fun spooky season read! The first section Gracetown wasn’t my fav, but everything after that was like 5 stars.
-the author gives you a little back story behind each chapter. It’s really cool peeking into someone’s mind and getting an idea of how their imagination works.
This was also free for me to listen to on Audible, so this was an awesome find!

Enchanting

I recommend this audiobook for fans of mystical horror and dystopian future fantasy. This is a very satisfying group of short stories that I found fascinating. The narrators were excellent.

I didn't think I would like it but did

I love Tananarive Due books. I bought and downloaded it as soon as I saw her name. I didn't realize it was short stories until the first one ended as it was an audible book. Damn, I said. I kept listening each time hurt that the stories didn't continue. I was very thankful for carrier series though. All the stories are very good just horribly short 😭.

Haunting and Beautiful

The fifteen stories collected in Ghost Summer are some of the most engaging short stories I've had the pleasure of reading. That pleasure was in no small part because these stories often provide a vastly different perspective from much of the horror and speculative fiction on the market, informed by the author's experiences as a black woman, both socially conscious and attuned to history. It's a perspective and worldview that readers should actively seek out because Tananarive Due successfully displays both the ways we are all the same and the stark differences that haunt many people to this day.
There's nothing not to love in this collection, but it's the Gracetown stories kicking everything off that stuck with me the most. This strange, haunted place in northern Florida arrests the reader just as it seems to capture residents and visitors, sometimes in horrifying ways. Gracetown is a place of transformation and possession. It's a town where the ghosts of a torturous, hateful past reveal uncomfortable truths.
Due provides us with glimpses of the past, of places where myth and legend overlap with the real world, where cultures collide with sometimes beautiful but often horrific results. We experience sadness and loss, sickness, and terror as the author paints all-too-real portraits of people, from those struggling to escape their circumstances to those hoping to find the peaceful embrace of death.
It isn't all about the past or present, as she also takes us to the end of the world, displaying a keen understanding of human nature that proved almost prescient when compared to the pandemic conditions that ushered us into the current decade.
Narration provided by Tananarive Due herself, as well as Robin Miles and Janina Edwards makes for a different experience from story to story, each individual breathing life into the narratives in slightly different ways, but never in an unsatisfactory manner.

More Emotional Than Expected

This collection of stories is truly fabulous. Each has either a tint of, or full-on submersion in the supernatural, as well as a depth of emotion running throughout. The characters feel immediately real and distinctly human. I’m so impressed with Tananarive Due’s unique ability to weave into her anthology a cultural and historical perspective that adds an extra layer of satisfaction for the reader.

It was such a treat getting a little nugget of background information from the author at the end of each story! And the sublime love letter of an Afterword written by Tananarive’s husband, Steven Barnes: just beautiful.

I enjoyed the narrators very much. Each one seemed to capture the tone and energy of a variety of characters - female and male of all ages. It’s nice when the author is a good and impactful narrator since the words belong to them.

Great short stories!

A book full of full stories! Talented author and narrators! A treat to listen to

Will be buying all of this author’s work!

Wow, just wow! I am going to be buying copies of this book for my family. I loved so many of the stories and the writing was incredible. I’m about to download more titles by this author right now.

liked most but not all

1st time hearing about this author and decided to give her a listen. I wasn't disappointed but I am not a fan of all of the stories. Also, most were read by her and it sounded a little monotonous but overall, a 4.5 of 5 because those that did captivate me were phenomenal.

Connections

These are very captivating stories. The best part to me was hearing how the stories came about and how they connected to or inspired by a part of her real life. Such an amazing imagination. Tananarive really takes the ‘what if’ question to heart and then allows it to explode on her pages.