WE WERE BEAUTIFUL She can't remember. She can't forget.

Narrator Misty Wells speaks in the voice of Mia in this YA audiobook of loss, grief, and healing. Mia’s family is broken, and she doesn’t understand what broke it. Now she has a ruined face, her mother and sister are gone, and her father has brought her to spend the summer with her grandmother—whom she’s never met. Then he disappears. Wells’s delivery is fast, almost ignoring punctuation and lacking nuance and emotion. Mia is given the same flat, breathless delivery whether she is unraveling the trauma that destroyed her family or opening herself to new people and relationships. Although Wells distinguishes other characters through tone and accent, her pace never varies, and the only breaks in her frenetic pace are the several seconds of silence between chapters. N.E.M. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine [Published: JUNE 2019]