Week 11′s free audiobooks from SYNC are all about vulnerability and, just as important, how vulnerability can be a gateway to new ideas, realizations, and friendships with others you may never have imagined knowing. Sarah Thebarge, the author of THE INVISIBLE GIRLS, brought her own vulnerability in the forms of a recent cancer surgery and living in a new city, to her meeting with a stranger on a train platform--a stranger, and recent immigrant, with whom she would become friends and through whom she would come to know the other woman’s young daughters. Author Gail Giles’s novel GIRLS LIKE US, recounts from two viewpoints--and through the two talented narrators Lauren Ezzo and Brittany Pressley--the worries and the triumphs of moving from special ed classrooms to living independently. Certainly there’s a lot of vulnerability here, both for the girls and for the elderly woman for whom they work through a sheltered employment program. And yes, as with Thebarge and her new friend Had and her daughters, Quincy and Biddy discover that vulnerability can offer a vantage point for insights and friendships. Listening is a kind of vulnerability, too: hearing these stories can open both your heart and your world.
