The Astonishing Life of August March: A Novel
By: Aaron Jackson / Narrated By: Joel Froomkin
Length: 7 hrs and 39 mins
Charming and delightful winds up being Beautiful!!!
Here’s the thing about Chirpbooks… The Limited Time Deals are so freaking good that I do NOT read the Publisher’s Summaries but snap audiobooks up with grand titles, appealing cover art. And what’s NOT to love about a title as nifty as The Astonishing Life of August March?
An actress who really doesn’t like the fact that she’s pregnant births her child offstage and tucks him into a laundry basket. After the show? Why, a chance to meet a Hollywood mogul so, uhm, well, the infant will be fiiiiiine, she’s sure, and so she’s off. An ancient laundress weeds through the jumbled garments and finds the baby, dubs him August March cuz she’s been looking at a calendar recently and decides: Why, I could be a mother… but without having to take him home… leave him to grow up here at the theater…
And so begins what truly IS an astonishing life. I read a blurb before writing this that comPLETEly echoes what I was thinking while I was listening to the true gem of a story: “Candide by way of John Irving with a hint of Charles Dickens”… Perfect summation as this is vaguely reminiscent of The World According to Garp what with that story’s juuuust-this-side of farfetched, plus our hero August learned how to speak from watching plays so his vocabulary, his manner of speaking is just WOW.
Growing up, trying to be a little kid whilst living in a theater has Eugenia Butler, the laundress, chucking flour over him to make him The Ghost who haunts the theater; surely NObody will question the presence of the ghost of a small child who died in the theater. When change happens, it’s always TO August, so he does what he must to survive and to cope. Try being a pickpocket at age 11-12 to survive, knocking back shots of liquor and getting blackout drunk to celebrate successful escapades.
An encounter with an aging Shakespearean actor has August truly in the man’s mind and heart, so after WWII, the actor triiiiies to bring stability to the completely feral young boy. It’s off to a boarding school where in English class? Oh August has read it all. Every. Single. Thing. But besides that? Oh August is sooo behind. But the headmaster, in distress and a last ditch effort, listens to a tirade that wound up in the Suggestion Box: Obviously from August: The school play is a travesty! an atrocity! it’s stinking up the entire school! And? The director sleeps through it all. And so, against the better judgment of Every. Single. Professor who’s had to deal with the irrepressibly feral August? He is sooo in and is now the official director of school plays. Yessss!!!
The entirety of the book is August’s search for meaning, a way to withstand the constant winds of change which blow him hither and yon, and this is done through incredibly tight writing by author Aaron Jackson. Jackson doesn’t shy away from the occasional crudity cuz, hey! life inside August’s mind is tough, a sometimes black place to be. And while it was easy being Nothing as a malleable child? Try being Nothing when a bit of hope, a bit of acceptance starts coming your way.
Joel Froomkin, aaaahhhh, where to start? where to start? First, ya know how I’m always kvetching about narrators twisting their voices around, juggling mightily to distinguish characters? You know how it peeves me to no end? Well, Froomkin juggles in the most audaciously wicked ways, throwing himself into the swift pacing of the action, the rapid-fire wit in the dialogue. This, dear Accomplice, is a simply stellar Performance with that big ol’ capital “P”!!! Sit back for 7 1/2-hours of unmitigated delight as his British narration dips and rises, captures American accents from the country over, as he carries a sometimes flailing, occasionally hopeful, usually distraught, fairly dissatisfied August through a life of calamity and near misses. Oh sir, I googled you to find just how on earth you managed to carry everyone off with such such SUCH perfection of tone and balance, of all accents, genders, temperaments. And I see you’re an Actor’s Actor. Well, yessss, indeed you are, sir! BeYONd fun listening to your work here!
Come for the quirkiness, the creativity of a life unspooled willy nilly, a bouncing around of all the ways a person could be unmoored from the get-go but who miiiiiight, just miiiiiight be surprised to find a single iota of Hope when all is said and done. Prepare for a character who drinks his dinner and gets the frequent black eye as he attempts to navigate a world where Life is Life, and ain’t that just totally suckwad sometimes.
Lovely, clever, so very hiLARious. But oh my, how it comes together, how it ends.
Beautiful!
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