Shadows (Book 1) audiobook
Audible – subscription/purchase
iBooks purchase (Mac/Apple)
Public Libraries (Hoopla or Libby)
Sample: Esther, read by Evie Yoder Miller
Sample: Betsey, read by Joanne Juhnke
Loyalties (Book 2) audiobook
Audible – subscription/purchase
iBooks purchase (Mac/Apple)
Public Libraries (Hoopla or Libby)
Sample: Fretz, read by Buzz Kemper
Sample: Jacob, read by Mark Wagler
Passages (Book 3) audiobook
Audible – subscription/purchase
iBooks purchase (Mac/Apple)
Public Libraries (Hoopla or Libby)
Sample: David, read by Alan Tripp
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- Seventeen Reasons to Listen to the Scruples on the Line Audiobooks
- Learning to be a Voice Actor – Evie/Esther
- Voice Acting: A Special Kind of Magic – Joanne/Betsey
Seventeen Reasons to Listen to the
Scruples on the Line Audiobooks
- Who doesn’t love hearing a story?
- You’ll never hear anything else remotely like this one.
- Your cousin told you there are some really good historical fiction books out there, and listening to the audiobook will make the trip home from work go much faster.
- You’re tired of stories that only present men during wartime, as if women and children’s lives don’t matter.
- You won’t get mixed up with who’s telling the story because each voice is distinctive; that’s five different voices at different places, from age seven to sixty at the start.
- If one reader annoys you, you can listen to a different voice. (Too bad about the story parts you’ll miss.)
- Your grandfather used to say: know where a person comes from, if you want to understand that person.
- James Baldwin said something like: We carry our history with us. It’s never fully past.
- Maybe you never gave much thought to why some folks during the Civil War didn’t want to fight for the North or the South. Maybe you don’t know what happened after.
- You always thought the lives of common folks were more fascinating than memorizing when Antietam happened or who General Grant replaced in the West.
- You could be busy doing the dishes and planning your next Saturday brunch, and find yourself caught up in words and phrases from the 19th century like skedaddle, tarnal, and cotton to. Now that’s something.
- Your great-great-great-grandpa fought in the Civil War.
- Family lore says, your great-grandma always pinched her lips tight when something came up about the Civil War.
- You’re worried that ignorance might not be bliss after all.
- You hear on the news about how some Israeli and Palestinian civilians’ lives are ruined and how other folks manage to escape death but live with dire conditions.
- No one ever said everyone has to be happy in a story for it to be good. (Well, almost no one.)
- Your teacher used to say: reading fiction helps you think about problems and how to solve them. She also said, “Be quiet and listen to something for once.”
- Seventeen Reasons to Listen to the Scruples on the Line Audiobooks
- Learning to be a Voice Actor – Evie/Esther
- Voice Acting: A Special Kind of Magic – Joanne/Betsey
- Top of page
Learning to be a Voice Actor
Learning to be a voice actor has been exciting and humbling. I became far too familiar with my unwanted mouth clicks and diminished lung capacity. But I enjoyed experimenting with dramatic pace and tone in how I read words and what those words could suggest. I gave myself permission to “become” Esther and to feel and speak what must have come from within her.
This was a different kind of “knowing” than the more intellectual work of using my writer’s lens to create her for a particular situation of a family embroiled in war’s reach. Using my own body to give voice to Esther’s thoughts and lived reality brought me closer to her and to the suffering of others. “Reading her” enlarged my understanding of the artistic process and of imagination’s power to enable identification.
Another memorable part of the audiobook experience for me: partnering with other readers. We were each committed to bringing life to one of the five voices of common citizens who told their stories. In turn, we readers became intertwined by the circles and tangents of our contrasting voices, stories, and experiences during the Civil War. When other participants from Madison Mennonite Church recorded short musical interludes from the time period, their voices and instruments created additional bridges between chapters. What fun to collaborate for a greater good!
— Evie
- Seventeen Reasons to Listen to the Scruples on the Line Audiobooks
- Learning to be a Voice Actor – Evie/Esther
- Voice Acting: A Special Kind of Magic – Joanne/Betsey
- Top of page
Voice Acting: A Special Kind of Magic
As I learned firsthand this past summer, there’s a special kind of magic involved in voice acting. How else could a 50-something, purple-haired twenty-first-century urban mama in a sound booth possibly think to portray a nineteenth-century Amish girl who lives in a small cabin with a large family?
With chutzpah on my part, and imagination on everyone else’s!
It’s been said that non-fiction promotes learning through information, and fiction promotes learning through imagination. Historical fiction like Scruples on the Line, I think, does both. In addition to the voice acting, Betsey Petersheim’s history collides with mine in the pages of Amish and Amish Mennonite Genealogies, co-authored by my grandmother Rachel Kreider. There’s no further historical information about Lovina/Betsey than what appears in the photograph from my grandmother’s book, but it was an honor to imagine her family to life with my voice and Evie Yoder Miller’s words.
— Joanne