Ancient History

I’ll admit, I rolled my eyes at first when *Ancient History* opened with yet another ‘opposites attract’ high school setup—nerd and jock, closeted and conflicted, blah blah. But Truman subverts the trope within chapters, fast-forwarding past the meet-cute to the far more interesting territory of *after*: after the betrayal, after the silence, after both men have built lives that look nothing like what they’d imagined at seventeen. The audiobook’s structure—alternating between ‘then’ and ‘now’—could feel gimmicky, but Toma’s narration sells it, using subtle vocal shifts to distinguish teenage bravado from adult exhaustion. His Hutch, in particular, is a masterclass in layered performance: the golden boy’s easy charm now laced with the gravel of a man who’s spent years pretending he doesn’t care. The pacing stumbles slightly in the middle, where a subplot about the protagonist’s career feels like a detour from the central emotional conflict. And while the chemistry between the leads is electric, some of their arguments repeat the same beats without enough new insight. That said, the prom night flashback sequence is *devastating*—Toma’s voice cracks just enough to make you feel the humiliation and hope in equal measure. The production quality is flawless, with no distracting edits or volume inconsistencies, which lets the story’s emotional peaks hit harder. By the end, I was annoyed at how invested I’d become (thanks, Truman), but in the best way—like revisiting a photo album and finding a picture of yourself you didn’t know existed.