The Best New Audiobooks for Kids and Families to Listen to This April
by Janssen Bradshaw
We’re just wrapping up spring break here, and it feels like the perfect time to add a few more audiobooks to our family life!
Grab something for the whole family while you take a road trip or listen to a couple as you enjoy more relaxing mornings at home.
My children love to listen while they color or build with Legos or while they eat a snack around the kitchen table.
Here are a couple of great new audiobooks for kids and families that are sure to be winners no matter what your plans are or what age group you’re looking for:
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Young Readers
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Skippyjon Jones and the Big Bones
You haven’t lived until you’ve listened to an audio version of Skippyjon Jones and this installment of this popular series is another winner as he goes in search of dinosaurs and the fabled Skipposaurus. If you don’t run right out and get every other Skippyjon Jones book, I’ll eat my hat!
Listen to a clip:
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Islandborn
You probably know Junot Díaz from his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but now he’s bringing his spectacular writing to picture books in this gorgeous story about memory and imagination.
Listen to a clip:
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Middle Grade
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Aru Shah and the End of Time
Available from:Did you know that Rick Riordan has his own imprint now? This is the first publication from it and if you have a child who loves his other books, this one is a surefire winner. Aru is a 12-year-old girl who likes to take some liberties with the truth, especially as she tries to fit in at her new school. It’s all going fine until she gets caught in a lie and her desperate attempts to manage the situation set loose an ancient demon. Now what?!
Listen to a clip:
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The Wild Robot Escapes
Last summer, we listened to The Wild Robot in the car as we drove back and forth to daily swimming lessons and it was such a fun and memorable part of our summer. So we were all thrilled to see Roz back in a new escapade — this time trying to find her way back to the island she learned to love and the baby gosling she adopted as her own.
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Frank Einstein and the Space-Time Zipper
Jon Scieszka has a knack for writing books that draw in even the most reluctant readers and his Frank Einstein series is one of his many winners. This six volume series wraps up here as Frank Einstein and his posse take on T. Edison, their archrival, as they battle to discover the mysteries of the universe! Scieszka is one of the two narrators and he’ll have you in stitches!
Listen to a clip:
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Young Adult
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I Have Lost My Way
Available from:I know from personal experience that you might not want to listen to Gayle Forman books in public because there is a high risk you’ll end up with tears streaming down your face. Even so, her books are always worth it, and this new title follows three teenagers — each struggling with their own challenges in dreams, love, and family — who find each other in Central Park and work together over the course of a day to figure out who they are and how to move forward.
Listen to a clip:
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Ginger Kid: Mostly True Tales from a Former Nerd
If your child was obsessed with Diary of a Wimpy Kid in elementary school, this is the nonfiction young adult version of being a misfit in school. In this hilarious series of essays, comedian Steve Hofstetter describes his seventh grade life from his first timid steps into dating to family drama to being a first-class nerd. Bonus points for it being read by the author!
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Obsidio
If you love a full cast audio, this one is going to knock your socks off, with more than 30 narrators and a complete soundscape that wraps up the Illuminae Files trilogy. The main characters barely escaped with their lives in the last book and now they are jammed on a container ship with 2,000 refugees. With almost no resources at their disposal, they head back to Kerenza, unsure of what they’ll find when they arrive, but ready to face the challenge head on.
Listen to a clip:
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Grown-Ups
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The Woman in the Window: A Novel
If you love a good thriller that will keep you listening long past your bedtime (or power you through a huge sink full of dishes or pile of laundry), this is for you. Anna Fox lives alone in New York with debilitating agoraphobia that keeps her in her home for months on end. But when she sees a crime happen involving the new neighbor family, she doesn’t know quite how to proceed. And as a listener, you won’t know who to trust and who to believe!
What great audiobooks has your family listened to recently? Share with us in the comments below.