Teens wrote most of this audiobook, and the byline names none of them. Jack Canfield appears as the author on a listing whose own description says the volume is full of teenagers sharing their experiences, which makes the credited name an editor's rather than a writer's. That is standard practice for the series and it is still worth saying out loud, because the appeal of the whole enterprise depends entirely on the stories coming from people the same age as the listener.
What Jack Canfield Delivers
The description sets out four territories: learning to accept life, becoming the best person you can be, being happy with who you are, and loving yourself no matter what. It also makes a point of what the book refuses to do, which is tell a teenager what they should and should not be doing. Encouragement without instruction is a narrow line to walk, and the fact that the copy leads with the refusal suggests the publishers knew adolescents can smell a lecture from a considerable distance.
Look at how the copy describes the book's function and you learn something about what it actually delivers. A guide, 'a beacon in the darkness, a safe haven in a storm, a warm hug in the cold and a respite from loneliness.' Four images in a row, all of them about presence rather than advice. Nothing in that list promises to solve anything. What the book offers is company, specifically the company of other teenagers who have been through the same thing, and that is a modest and honest claim.
Its oldest response is also its most telling. A five-star review from January 2010 comes from someone who read the book as a teenager, loved it, and is now watching a niece read it and love it too. Fifteen years on, that is the whole product in one sentence. Nobody remembers a specific story from these anthologies. They remember having had one when they needed it, and they pass it on.
What Jack Canfield Gets Right
Someone reviewing this in print made the best accidental case for the audio. A five-star response from October 12, 2013 bought it for a granddaughter and reports that 'She doesn't like to read but the short stories will keep her attention.' That is the reluctant-reader argument in a sentence, and audio takes it further: a teenager who will not open a book will put on headphones, and a story that ends in four minutes does not require the sustained attention that made the book a hard sell in the first place.
Anthology form suits the medium unusually well for exactly that reason. Nothing is sequential, so no plot exists to lose and no penalty for drifting off during one piece and returning for the next. You can start at any point. You can replay a single story that landed. Seventy-one minutes fits inside a school run with room to spare, which means the whole thing can be heard twice in a week without anyone setting aside time for it.
Register matters too. First-person accounts from teenagers, read aloud, arrive closer to overheard conversation than to instruction, and that is precisely the effect the material wants. A printed page of teen testimony still looks like homework. The same words spoken sound like someone talking, which quietly resolves the tension the description works so hard to address when it insists nobody here is going to preach at you.
Where Jack Canfield Loses Some Ground
Runtime is the thing to examine before you buy. Seventy-one minutes is a very small container for a book whose description promises more inspiring stories than its predecessor and coverage across four separate themes. Nothing on this listing says abridged, selected, or highlights. Whatever proportion of the full volume this represents, it is a portion, and a buyer expecting the complete anthology in audio should adjust that expectation now rather than at minute seventy.
Its response pool needs the same care. All five written reviews come from adults buying for someone else, three of them for granddaughters, one for a son, one for a niece. Not one is from the teenager the book was written for. One response from October 24, 2013 opens by noting 'This book was in good condition,' which is a verdict on a physical object rather than a recording. These are reports that a gift was well received, which is genuinely useful information and is not a review of the listening experience.
Consider the vintage as well. This edition dates from 2005, and the description's central claim is that teenagers now juggle more pressure than young adults did twenty years earlier. That comparison is itself two decades old now, which means the baseline it invokes is the mid-eighties and the present it describes predates the phone in your teenager's hand. The emotional material ages well. The social specifics do not.
Who Should Pick Up Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul II
The clearest use case appears in a March 2015 response from a parent who bought it for a teenage son going through a particularly difficult stretch and found it genuinely useful, describing it as 'positive and encouraging.' That is the moment this book is built for: not general reading, but a specific rough patch where a teenager needs evidence that other people their age have survived something similar and said so.
Households where reading is a fight are the other clear case. Seventy minutes in the car, with a parent present and nobody obliged to discuss it afterward, does work that a book handed over at bedtime will not. Buyers on this page span three generations of the same households, grandparents and parents alike, and the pattern has evidently held across all of them.
Skip it if you want the complete anthology, because the runtime says you are not getting it. Skip it too if your teenager finds uplift grating, since the entire premise is sincerity and nothing here is ironic about it. For everyone else this is an hour of peers talking honestly about difficulty, which is a reasonable thing to have on hand, and an easier gift to give than a conversation.
- Voice: Danielle Fishel is the credited reader across a very short seventy-one minutes of first-person stories written by teenagers.
- Big ideas: Self-acceptance, adolescent pressure, peer experience as instruction, encouragement without instruction
- Atmosphere: Warm, brisk, unembarrassed about wanting to help
- Worth it?: A useful seventy minutes for a teenager in a rough patch, provided you understand you are getting a selection rather than the book.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this audiobook the complete book or a selection?
The listing does not say, which is the problem. Seventy-one minutes cannot hold a full anthology promising more stories than its predecessor across four themes, so treat it as a selection. If you want everything, buy the text edition and use this as a companion for car journeys or a sampler.
Do I need the first Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul audiobook first?
Not at all. The description positions this as a continuation in spirit rather than in sequence, and every piece stands alone. Someone who enjoyed the first will recognize the format immediately, and someone starting here loses nothing, since the stories are unconnected accounts by different teenagers.
