One headline on this page reads A mesmerizing memoir and an unreliable narrator, and on an audio edition that phrase lands twice. JoAnne Goldberg means it as criticism, awarding five stars to a book while doubting parts of it. Julia Haart, though, reads Brazen herself, all 19 hours and 11 minutes of this audiobook, so the unreliable narrator under discussion is also the person reading to you. Not many memoirs put that question to a listener quite so directly.
How Brazen Holds Up
What Haart left is described without euphemism: a childhood in which what she wore, what she ate and what she thought were set by the dictates of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, a marriage arranged at nineteen after a lifetime spent caring for seven younger siblings, and twenty-three years in which that marriage governed everything else. The break came through her daughter. Miriam began asking why she could not sing in public, run in shorts, or ride a bike without being covered from neck to knee, and those questions turned out to have no answer that Haart could live with.
Here the book becomes a different genre altogether. She built a double life first, studying fashion magazines when nobody was watching and assembling what the flap copy calls a freedom fund. She left at forty-two. Within a week she had founded a shoe brand, within nine months she was at Paris Fashion Week, and a few years after that she was creative director of La Perla and then co-owner and chief executive of Elite World Group. The pace of that sentence is the pace of the second half, and not every reader believes it. The flap copy closes the account by naming her four children, Batsheva, Shlomo, Miriam and Aron, and reporting that they have not only accepted but embraced the transformation, which is a claim a memoir can make and a family cannot easily dispute in print.
Why Brazen Works as an Audiobook
Two facts about this recording outrank any performance note. The first is that the author reads it. The second is what she was raised to believe about her own voice, in a world where a girl could be forbidden to sing where anyone might hear her. Nineteen hours of a woman giving her own account, uninterrupted, is the argument the book is making, restated as a format. Self-narration is not a marketing convenience in this case. It is the thesis.
A memoir this long asks for genuine commitment, and the column disagrees about where the value sits. Amazon Customer, the four-star grade, finds the first half on the religious life stronger than the second half on the fashion career. Lina Alta had the opposite experience, unable to stop, and credits the book with finally explaining why the fundamentalist branches of major religions treat women the way they do. That review also puts a finger on why the second act works at all, describing an author intelligent and charismatic enough that you understand why people kept following her into a new business. Both are describing the same recording, and the disagreement is really about which of the two acts you came for.
Weak Spots in Brazen
By the numbers this listing argues with itself. The badge reads 4.2, the vote counter reads two, while five written responses sit underneath it. JoAnne Goldberg's review then answers a group that does not appear here at all, the one-star reviewers, whose perspective that review calls valid before setting it aside. The column you can read is therefore not the column that produced the score, and the harshest criticism of this book reaches you secondhand, described by someone who disagrees with it.
That criticism deserves weight, because the four-star review makes its own version, arguing that the account has gaps large enough to cost it credibility. This is the standing hazard of the escape memoir: a story told entirely by the person who got out, about people who will not be answering. JoAnne Goldberg holds both halves at once, calling the book mesmerizing and its narrator unreliable in a single line, and observing that it doubles as an indictment of Haart's mother, who comes across as selfish and often cruel. The same reviewer sets the whole thing in proportion, noting that ultra-Orthodox Jews in America are a minority inside an already tiny minority, that some people are devoted to that life, and that it plainly does not suit everyone.
When Karen R stops at three stars, credibility is not the issue. That review applauds the escape and the business achievements, then objects to the intimate details of Haart's sex life as unnecessary and a distraction from everything else, with the disclaimer of being no prude attached. The objection carries differently in this format, since the woman it happened to is the one telling you, which makes those passages either the most honest thing in the book or the most uncomfortable, depending entirely on the listener.
The Right Listener for Brazen
Every listener who comes for the fashion ascent will be given it, and the better book is the one underneath: a study of how a closed system maintains itself and what leaving costs a person. The material on clothing is the clearest example, since the rule that a garment exists only to cover the body, with any thought beyond that counting as an affront to God, explains both the life she left and the industry she ran to. Tommy Hilfiger, quoted at the top of the flap copy, describes a story of longing for more and manifesting that vision.
This edition also carries a downloadable file of photographs and end notes, which is a strange object to bolt onto nineteen hours of speech. The photographs are precisely what a recording cannot supply, and the notes are the apparatus a curious listener would most want and least be able to consult while driving. Worth opening once the listening is done, if only to put faces to a family you have spent a working week with.
Where that leaves a buyer is simple enough. The book is long, one-sided by design, warmly received by four of the five people who have written here, and read aloud by a woman with an obvious interest in being believed. Becca's review runs to five short fragments, not one of them a complete sentence, and still gets the tone right: brave, brave girl, couldn't put it down. Take the numbers on this page as decoration, and the voice as the evidence.
Good to Know
Nineteen hours is long for a memoir. What fills the Brazen audiobook?
Roughly two books. The first covers a childhood, an arranged marriage at nineteen and twenty-three years inside an ultra-Orthodox community. The second covers the escape at forty-two and a fashion career that runs from a shoe brand to a global modeling agency. Reviewers disagree about which half earns its length.
Which parts of the audiobook did the three-star reviewer object to?
Explicit enough that one three-star reviewer, who insists on not being a prude, wished the intimate details had been left out. The material is not gratuitous in intent, since bodily control is the book's subject, but it is delivered in the author's own voice, which some listeners find harder than reading it.
