And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again

I’ll admit I approached this with skepticism—another pandemic book? But *And We Came Outside* disarmed me within minutes. Raechel Wong’s narration is the secret weapon here. She doesn’t *perform* the pieces so much as *channels* them, her voice shifting just enough to distinguish a teenager’s diary from a frontline nurse’s journal without slipping into caricature. The standout for me was the juxtaposition of a poet’s abstract grief with a grocery clerk’s blunt, profane account of panic-buying; the whiplash between the two felt intentional, like the audiobook itself was mimicking the disorientation of 2020. That said, the pacing isn’t perfect. A few of the longer essays drag in audio form, their dense prose demanding more from Wong’s delivery than even she can provide—this is a book that occasionally *needs* to be read with the eyes, not just heard. And while the diversity of voices is a strength, the transitions between them can feel abrupt, like flipping radio stations mid-thought. Still, the moments that land *really* land: a father’s voicemail to his quarantined daughter, a list of things missed (‘the smell of a stranger’s perfume in an elevator’), a doctor’s offhand remark about ‘the sound of ventilators in unison.’ It’s these specifics that make the audiobook haunting, not the grand themes. If you’re looking for catharsis, you might leave frustrated. But if you want to sit with the unresolved, the beautiful, and the brutally ordinary? This is your book.