Everyone Knows You Go Home

By: Natalia Sylvester / Narrated By: Frankie Corzo

Length: 10 hrs and 37 mins

Egregiously atrocious narration aaaalmost completely tanks this >MEH< story…

Here’s the deal: It’s like this audiobook needs a translator and constant reprocessing. Frankie Corzo, NOT a favorite of mine due to previous listens where her performances were rather lackluster, delivers The Most CHOPPY and Unenthusiastic Performance of her somewhat lamentable career. From the get-go, I was looking down at my phone to see if freakin’ Audible crashed yet again (The updates to their app create HAVOC, I say!!!), and I was always startled… and disgusted… to see that it was just Corzo doin’ I dunno what. Turning pages? Eating a turkey leg? Dunno, just cease and desist, Ms. Corzo, in the name of all that is good and holy in the recording world!!!

Further? Author Natalia Sylvester crafts a story where there are moments of danger, despair, things like that. And Corzo just kinda haltingly plods along, never changing her tone, and never doing anything BUT making the prose difficult to understand. One has to pause (It’s okay, Corzo is usually in mid-PAAAAUSE so you won’t miss the next sentence…) and think about the words lamely delivered to parse out intent, to collate bits o’ story, and then one gathers it all up to suss out what’s going on.

Not that much is going on. Our story opens with Martin (Corzo pronounces this as Mar’inn) and Isa on their wedding day with Mar’inn’s dead dad in the car. When Isa sees Omar, she’s unsurprised and begins a relationship with the ghost, a relationship Mar’inn has forbidden because Omar walked out on the family when he was little. Omar is Dead To Him!!!

And then nothing happens.

Add a dual timeline so that we get Mar’inn’s folks, Omar and Elda, and their journey to the US and what happens to them as they struggle along in an unforgiving country. Chuck in a nephew freshly across the border, undocumented, alone, a bit of a handful until he’s an All Knowing Saint, and there ya go: Sylvester’s Story with Corzo’s Unflinching Butchering.

Now see, Big Sis posited that there were opportunities for great storytelling here; that Everyone Knows You Go Home does what the HiLARiously Pathetic and Egregiously Plagiarized American Dirt does not. Sylvester shows a muuuuuch more accurate depiction of a fraught border crossing after all. She points out that at no point in these traveler’s journeys does anyone pop out a cell phone that’s miraculously charged and that receives a perfect signal. And things are BAD withOUT being, say, riDICulously overwrought.

So there’s that.

Me? I was wondering what the point of the story was. A tale of two bits of the same family? With Isa screeching, PERPETUALLY, that Mar’inn needs to share more! Who is he! She doesn’t even know this man she’s married to! Blah Blah Look, Elda’s on her deathbed and Isa’s STILL screaming all these things at him Blah. Omar as a ghost is only popped into the story in bits and pieces. Elda might be the strongest character, but she’s totally upstaged by just how inCREDibly lackluster the other characters are.

Nope.

No point. Just missed opportunities for something truly magical to occur, and with Corzo having a chance to deliver something that the Latinx community could be proud of, but instead she pronounces all names in Spanish… except Mar’inn’s… but delivers the rest of the prose with a lame evenness that in no WAY captures the song and hum of a dialogue between members of a familia.

So here I bring you, something for our Magical Realism category, but it’s not. Something for Hispanic Heritage Month, but it’s lame. Something that had a compelling premise, but such a flawed execution as to be staggering.

Dude, could NOT speed this sucker up fast enough. Corzo needed the extra mmmph of x1.7. Sylvester needed… well, just to have ended sooooner…!