In Brief
- Voice: Connor Franta reads his own material, the only sensible casting for a memoir assembled from his texts, notes and annotated postcards.
- Big ideas: coming of age online, bullying and dating, family and Midwestern childhood, identity built in public
- Atmosphere: Light, fragmentary, sincere
- Worth it?: Worth three hours if the video audience is where you are coming from; the photographs do not survive the transfer.
A book built out of postcards is a strange thing to convert into three hours of audio, and the publisher summary describes exactly that: an audiobook "filled with annotated postcards, notes, texts, tweets, journal entries, emails, and letters." The postcards are not a metaphor. "The front of the postcards feature his photos," the copy says, "with the back answering questions from fans." One side of every unit in this book is a photograph. In the edition you are being offered, that side does not exist.
The Review
Postcards, tweets and journal entries sound like a scrapbook, and the copy insists it is not one. "Listened to from start to finish, the book tells a coherent narrative about Connor's coming of age and becoming an adult." The through-line runs "from bullying to dating to leaving home," and the shifting formats do work of their own: the mix of letters, texts and emails is meant to "reflect changes in Connor's own use of technology over the last several years." A memoir whose containers carry the chronology is a real idea, not a design flourish. An email reads differently from a text, and a handwritten note differently again, so the medium of each entry dates it about as reliably as a timestamp would.
Sections organize the whole thing, each opening with a short introduction, and the copy walks you through one: a family section starts with a piece on Connor's family "and what he's learned from them." The self-description is "a cross between an essay collection and a coming-of-age memoir, told in brief." Told in brief is the operative phrase. Nothing here runs long, so three hours and eight minutes is enough, and the book survives being picked up in fragments.
Somebody calling themselves Review Nerd files the most revealing entry on the page, and not for the reason intended. It opens with a daughter who "loves this YouTuber and had to have this book," who "struggles with depression and anxiety," and who found it "nice to see another persons struggles and to see that everything does get better." Then, mid-paragraph and without warning, the review becomes marketing: "In this intimate memoir of life beyond the camera, Connor Franta shares the lessons he has learned..." A real reaction and a press release, welded together in one body of text.
Why A Work in Progress Works as an Audiobook
Franta reads it, and that single fact resolves most of the format problem. A memoir assembled from texts, tweets and handwritten notes has no natural narrator except the person who wrote them, and hearing an annotated postcard delivered by the annotator is closer to the intended experience than a hired reader would get. Author and narrator are one person here, and for a book this personal that is the only configuration that makes sense.
Three hours and eight minutes fits comfortably inside one sitting, and the material rewards being taken that way. Simon and Schuster Audio released it in May 2015, at the point where the vlogging audience was the entire market for it, and the reviews confirm the route in: one reader opens by admitting to avoiding memoirs entirely and coming to this one "because I watch Connor's YouTube videos." What that reader found was "his quirky sense of humor" and an account of "his childhood, his family, his life crises." The runtime also tells you what the book is reaching for. A three-hour memoir is not asking to be weighed against the literary shelf; it is a short deliberate object aimed at people who already care.
Hearing the voice is, oddly, what the reviews reach for even when nobody is listening. The entry from Brazil describes "uma narrativa tão íntima e suave" and then the phrase that matters here: "posso ouvir sua voz em cada frase." That reader is describing the sensation of hearing a voice while reading printed pages. This edition supplies the thing that review was reaching for, and does it literally, which is the strongest argument the format has.
The Caveats
Photographs are the cost, and it is not a small one. The description makes the images structural: fronts of postcards showing "both of himself and the things that inspire him." Annotations imply handwriting on a page. Tweets and texts carry a shape on the screen that a read-aloud version flattens into ordinary sentences. This listing says nothing about a companion PDF, so a buyer should assume the visual half is gone and decide whether the remaining half is worth three hours. The publisher summary never flags the loss, the kind of omission a buyer discovers only after paying.
Grades on this page do not agree with the badge above them. Five reviews are visible, all five carry 5.0, and the displayed average is 4.6, which is lower than anything a reader can actually see. The vote counter says 2. Whatever population produced that figure, it is not the five people who wrote. By contrast the written column is unanimous, and unanimity from a fanbase is worth reading with the fanbase in mind.
Every review here dates from between April 2015 and February 2017, and one of them was filed nearly a month before the release date on this record. They are the reactions of an audience that already knew the author from video, at once the point of the book and the limit of the testimony. Jennifer opens as "a self-proclaimed Connor obsessed fan." A listener arriving without that history has nobody here speaking for them. The window matters for another reason too: a title carrying the word Progress admits to being an interim report, and this record offers no later volume to set beside it, no update, and no sign of one.
Who Should Listen to A Work in Progress
Fans who came in through the videos are the audience this was designed for, and every reviewer here confirms the design worked on them. It also suits younger listeners looking for a coming-of-age account that covers bullying, dating and leaving home without a lecture attached, and the short sections make it easy to take in pieces. The author reading his own material is the version worth having. Avoid it when you want a conventional narrative memoir, when the missing photographs would nag at you, or when a celebrity memoir aimed squarely at an existing following is not what you came for. Three hours costs little; the postcards are the price.
Questions Listeners Ask
Does an audiobook made of postcards and photographs actually work?
Partly. The written halves come through intact and the author reads them himself, which suits material this personal. What disappears is the visual side: photo fronts, handwriting, the shape of a tweet on a screen. Nothing on the page promises a PDF, so plan on roughly half the design being gone.
Why is the rating lower than every review on the audiobook page?
All five visible reviews grade the book at five stars, yet the badge displays 4.6 and the counter registers two votes. The number cannot be describing the people whose words appear underneath it. Read the five entries and weigh them against their evident enthusiasm for the author.
