TWELVE TIMES BLESSED

The title refers to the business started by True Dickinson: a gift-of-the-month club for new babies and their moms. Aside from her flourishing business, True has a young son, a mother, friends with lives of their own, and her own feelings of loss and emptiness, until she meets a man . . . a younger man. Narrator Robin Miles delivers the story in straightforward fashion and creates various voices and accents from Cape Cod to New Orleans to color the dialogue. In the author interview at the end of the tape Mitchard expresses her preference for narrators who vocally differentiate characters. Miles does so, but, unfortunately, many of the voices she provides are unsympathetic to the characters and, therefore, do not succeed. J.P. (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine [Published: OCT/ NOV 03]