Like

Lois Chimimba doesn’t just narrate *Like*—she *becomes* it. Her voice is a chameleon, sliding between Amy’s clipped Scottish tones and Ash’s clipped English cadence without ever resorting to caricature. She nails the rhythm of Smith’s prose, stretching out the silences between lines until they hum with unspoken history, then snapping into sharp, witty exchanges that land like quicksilver. The audiobook’s production amplifies this: the sound design subtly underscores the duality of the story, with echoes and subtle shifts in ambience that make the borders between England and Scotland feel porous, even tactile. That said, Smith’s nonlinear structure—jumping between past and present with the precision of a poet but the occasional opacity of a puzzle box—can feel like a hurdle rather than a thrill. Some listeners might crave a firmer hand holding the timeline, but if you lean into the dreamy disorientation, the payoff is sublime. My biggest critique? The ending fizzles just a hair too soon, as if Smith decided the heart of the story was the journey, not the destination. But then again, maybe that’s the point—this book isn’t about arrival, but the electric charge of the in-between.