Let me state a couple of my biases upfront because they cut against this book and I think you should know how much salt to take my opinion with. First, I listened to this one as an audiobook. As a relatively new listener to audiobooks, I’m still calibrating the precise impact the format has on my enjoyment of a novel, but in general it seems harder for me to invest in fiction when I listen to it as opposed to reading it. Second, I had no idea when I started reading The Listeners that it contained an element of fantasy, nor that its author was a YA fantasy writer publishing her first work intended for adults. If I had been aware of either I almost certainly would’ve passed on the novel.
As for why I did pick up The Listeners, that’s easy: the premise really seemed like a cant-miss. The Listeners is centered around June, a woman who manages an exclusive resort hotel named The Avallon in West Virginia in the early 1940s. When the United States enters the war, June learns that her hotel’s owner has made a deal with the State Department to allow the federal government to use the hotel to house diplomats from the axis powers, essentially turning the Avallon into a high-class prison. Agents from FBI will also be on hand to maintain order, and potentially learn what they can about America’s enemies from the hotel’s new guests. One agent in particular, the improbably named Tucker Rye Minnick (you can take the author out of YA, but you can’t take the YA out of the author), catches June’s eye even as she’s incredibly bust maintaining order among her staff.
If you or I had hit upon such dynamite idea for a historical novel, we might have focused on the stories of the diplomats and the staff of the hotel, all the tensions and conflicts that might erupt in such an unprecedented scenario. But not Stiefvater. No, she’s far more focused on the blossoming romance between June and Tucker, who are both too uncomplicated to feel real to the reader, and on the absurdly shoe-horned in fantasy material, some nonsense about how the Avallon is special because of the magical properties of the nearby waters. I have to be completely honest and tell you that I zoned out a lot when these waters came up, so I’m not in a position to tell you more about that part of the story.
The main plot involving the actual guests has to do with a German ambassador’s daughter who some undefined mental disability making it very risky for her to go back to Germany. When the U.S. government makes a deal to exchange some of the hotel’s guests for American diplomats stranded abroad, Tucker struggles to decide whether to do what he believes is right or to do his duty, while June plots to save the little girl any way she can.
Whatever intrigue you might feel from that description, I promise it is not enough to sustain you through this too-long, sluggishly paced bore of a YA novel posing as literary fiction.
