Narrating A Short Story That Tugs At The Heart

The Harmonica, by Tony Johnston

Sometimes--oftentimes, truth be known--I enjoy narrating for Learning Ally more than I enjoy narrating for a high per-finished-hour (PFH ) audiobook for a major publisher or even one of my favorite public domain books for Spoken Realms. Learning Ally's audiobooks are designed to help people with "print disabilities, including blindness, visual impairment and dyslexia," get the most out of reading by pairing the spoken word with the written word.

This Sunday morning, I got a call from one of Learning Ally's directors, wanting to know if I had the time to narrate, edit, and produce a very short (under 10-minute) audiobook, "The Harmonica," by Tony Johnston. The target market for the audiobook/picture book is pre-teen, but the story itself, about a young boy taken from his parents during the Nazi occupation of Poland in World War II, transcends age. It is a hauntingly beautiful story of love, music, and a gift. The turnaround time was a day, shorter if possible. For whatever reason the timeline was tight. I didn't hesitate to say yes, of course.

Within a few minutes, I had downloaded the PDF that was sent to me, and I fired up Studio One, Audition, and iZotope RX6, and got the Dungeon ready for the recording. As I pre-read the story, it pulled me in, touched me, and left me sad but hopeful as it concluded. The story is based on the author's experience as a boy, but written not as documentation, but as a love-letter to his parents and to Franz Schubert. The director asked me to give the story a voice the target audience of pre-teens would relate to--a bit of a stretch for an older narrator, but the challenge was a good one. The project was done within two hours and uploaded to Learning Ally.