Rippin' It Old School

I’ll admit, I side-eyed the premise at first—*another* kid-genius story? But *Rippin’ It Old School* won me over in minutes, thanks to its relentless wit and surprisingly tender core. Keith Emerson isn’t just a one-hit wonder; he’s a kid grappling with the terror of being *forgotten*, and Bean writes that vulnerability with a lightness that never tips into schmaltz. The audiobook’s real MVP, though, is Nick Podehl. His narration is *alive*—he doesn’t just read the jokes, he *throws* them, whether it’s Keith’s internal spiral (‘*I used to be somebody!*’) or the over-the-top reactions of his classmates. The production is crisp, with no distracting edits, though I’ll dock half a point for a few moments where the pacing feels *too* frantic, like the story’s racing to keep up with its own energy. Where it stumbles slightly is in the secondary characters—some, like Keith’s rival, verge on cartoonish—but the heart of the story (that desperate, universal need to *matter*) lands hard. The fart jokes? Yeah, they’re here, but they’re never the point. Instead, this is a story about the exhaustion of performing, the relief of failing spectacularly, and the quiet joy of finding your people. For parents, it’s a sneaky conversation starter about pressure; for kids, it’s a permission slip to laugh at the chaos. And at two and a half hours, it’s the rare audiobook that respects a young listener’s attention span while leaving them actually *wanting* more.