THE AFTERLIFE OF STARS

Two boys are at the center of this audiobook about a family that flees the Soviet crackdown that ended the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Robert, the narrator of the novel, is 9.8 years old; Attila is 13.7. Their flight, marked by both tragedy and comedy, takes them to Paris and to a deeper understanding of their family's history and what the Nazis did to them. This is a powerful novel, but narrator Tristan Morris adopts a Hungarian accent for the dialogue. Rather than enhancing the audiobook, the accent is a layer of distraction that listeners have to cut through to find the story. Morris would have done better without it. G.S.D. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine [Published: MARCH 2017]