In a flash, Kerry’s life has fallen apart: Her marriage is over; her best friend, Siobhan, isn’t speaking to her; and she just can’t make any headway on writing the novel that scored her a juicy book deal. Kerry’s tendency to drink too much probably isn’t helping, so when she is offered a stint as a winter caretaker for an upstate motel, she hopes to use the opportunity to escape her problems and focus on her writing. But when Kerry discovers a motel room littered with booze and drugs and encounters a dead body in a snowdrift, her writing retreat goes out the window . . . and then a winter storm moves in, and the power goes out. In Leah Konen’s clever homage to The Shining, The Last Room on the Left (10 hours), listeners won’t be sure whom to trust—is Kerry reliable, or has her addiction colored her sense of reality? Two of the narrators’ voices (Karissa Vacker as Kerry and Erin Bennett as Siobhan, the third narrator being Julie Webster) are perhaps overly similar, making it more difficult to keep the novel’s overlapping chronologies straight—but nevertheless, The Last Room on the Left is a near-perfect listen, especially on a chilly night.
Valiant Women is a vital and engrossing attempt to correct the record and rightfully celebrate the achievements of female veterans of World War II.
