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Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab
- Narrated by: Graham Rowat, Kevin R. Free
- Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins
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Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab
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Publisher's Summary
A young man travels to Trinidad to reconnect with a transgender parent, uncovering the complex realities of love and family.
Jonathan Lewis-Adey was nine when his parents separated, and his mother, Sid, vanished entirely from his life. It is not until he is a grown man that Jonathan finally reconnects with his beloved lost parent, only to find, to his shock and dismay, that the woman he knew as "Sid" in Toronto has become an elegant man named Sydney living in his native Trinidad.
For nine years, Jonathan has paid regular visits to Sydney on his island retreat, trying with quiet desperation to rediscover the parent he adored inside this familiar stranger, and to overcome his lingering confusion and anger at the choices Sydney has made. At the novel's opening, Jonathan is summoned urgently to Trinidad where Sydney, now aged and dying, seems at last to offer him the gift he longs for: a winding story that moves forward sideways as it reveals the truths of Sydney's life. But when and where the story will end is up to Jonathan, and it is he who must decide what to do with Sydney's haunting legacy of love, loss, and acceptance.
What listeners say about Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance1 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Alex
- 2023-03-28
Amazing queer Caribbean lit/horrible reading
Shani Mootoo is a talented author and writes beautiful pros in this queer narrative travelling between Canadian diaspora and Trinidad and Tobago. Mootoo’s words take you along with the protagonists over and through TT and through the journey of their emotions and adventures. Even with the pains the protagonists endure, it’s warming to have a queer story part of Caribbean literature in this captivating novel.
The narration was discouragingly poor quality. The text includes dialogue in Trinbagonian English and Trinbagonian Creole, and the narrators’ accents attempting to read in the Caribbean vernacular was painful to listen to, confused and mixing Irish, Commonwealth English accents, and some false perception of a Caribbean accent together. The sound is the image of a white dude trying to speak in a Caribbean voice or parallel image of a white dude trying to speak AAVE. The Trinbagonian vernacular is full of melody in both intonation, pronunciation, and vocabulary, as much as the non-word sounds of the language too. None of the magic of the Trinbagonian language can be justly heard or celebrated in this audiobook, and this is a huge disappointment to language arts. If the audiobook narrators cannot accurately do a Caribbean accent, it would have been better for the text to be read purely in their natural North American accents.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance2 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- JL
- 2023-12-27
Narrator's accent was painfully distracting
The accents used for dialogues sounded more Irish than Trinidadian.
Please hire Trinbagonian narrators
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