SOUL KISS

A young African-American child abandoned by her troubled mother seeks passionate and familial love as she comes of age in the tumultuous '60s and '70s. Why does a recorded book fail? Sometimes failure is due to a flawed text, sometimes due to the narrator's lack of inspiration. Maybe failure is simply due to the listener's lack of interest in the story itself. This narrative is encumbered by a sluggish text and a narrator whose dulcet voice becomes a monotone as it fails to distinguish among characters, genders, ages, and races. P.R. (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine [Published: AUG/SEP 03]