The Swan Bonnet is an audiobook

The Swan Bonnet is now available as an audiobook! It is narrated by Pamela Hershey who specializes in Young Adult, Children's and Mystery books.

I was very glad to hear Pamela's audition at ACX.com. The Swan Bonnet entails dialogue from its fourteen year old protagonist, Dawn, other teenagers in a small Alaskan town, and adults from different backgrounds. While the narrative voice stood out with consistency and worked for the region, the dialogue parts rebound well and make for easy listening.

She says of this project, “The Swan Bonnet was a great book to narrate. The main character, Dawn was a very strong young girl and her experiences were things that any young woman could relate to today. It was fascinating to learn about those early days of Alaska and the people who lived there then. The language used throughout the book made the narration enjoyable as I love language and metaphors.”

Pamela studied acting and Readers' Theater in college and works fulltime now as an audiobook narrator. She can be found on Facebook at Pamela Hershey Voice Over or at her website www.voiceoverbypamelahershey.com . When she's not narrating, she can be found either with her dog or her horse or fighting weeds in her garden.

The Swan Bonnet was the manuscript I chose to present at Authonomy.com, the HarperCollins site where book writers read the work of others and could contribute comments or critiques. I wondered how I had fared with my historical subject. The first ten chapters went to the Editor's Desk where the manuscript received a review from a HarperCollins editor. While I benefited from suggestions for revision, these are the encouraging comments from the HarperCollins editor:

“What a relaxing, classic, and vibrant story. I loved reading about the swans and their histories, and seeing how the family interacted with each other …. I really like where the story is going and I love the setting – Alaska feels vibrant and alive in your storytelling hands.”

TheSwan Bonnet became my second audiobook because of its adventure and its outdoor, endangered bird theme. I thought of it as a contemporary Western where the white hat was worn by a woman.

Here is the synopsis:

Unbeknown to Dawn, her grandfather has shot an old swan out of mercy. In their coastal Alaskan town, her father buys the swan pelt, preventing her Uncle Alex, a fur trader, from selling it for export. Dawn’s father surprises her part-Aleut mother with a hat she helped to make and also with an idea to catch poachers. Shooting swans has become illegal but Alaska is a territory and Prohibition occupies the Sheriff.

Dawn and her mother become involved with suspicious inquiries about the swan bonnet besides its haunting effect. Because Dawn’s grandparents see the swans first, Dawn agrees to secretly watch the migration with the deputy sheriff’s son. But after she and her mother encounter women from a ship and find out about a hunting party, they ride to the inlet. There are townspeople roving the shore too but who is the vigilante and who is the poacher?