Quick Take
- Narration: Dion Graham and Mychal-Bella Bowman create a genuinely dual-register performance, Graham’s resonant voice anchoring the more epic tales while Bowman brings youthful energy to the shorter folklore pieces.
- Themes: Black beauty and cultural pride, fairy tale reinvention, African and African American folklore
- Mood: Vibrant and celebratory, shot through with mythic grandeur
- Verdict: A collection that does real imaginative work rather than simply swapping character descriptions, worth the listen for families with children of any age.
I came to CROWNED through a roundabout route. A colleague had sent me a link to CreativeSoul Photography’s work months earlier, and I had spent an evening scrolling through images of children in elaborate costumes drawn from African royalty and folklore, photographs so visually specific and so full of intentional beauty that they lodged in my mind. When I found out Kahran and Regis Bethencourt had extended that visual project into an audio collection of reimagined fairy tales, I cleared a Sunday morning to listen straight through.
The AudioFile review that appears in the synopsis is accurate: Dion Graham and Mychal-Bella Bowman’s performances are the engine of this listening experience. At just over three hours, CROWNED is a collection of distinct pieces rather than a single sustained narrative, which means the production rises and falls with each individual story, and the narrators have to reinvent their approach repeatedly without losing cohesion. They mostly succeed.
What Reinvention Actually Means Here
The word reimagines in the synopsis does not quite capture what Kahran and Regis are doing with these tales. This is not simply a project of diversifying the casting of existing stories, though that is part of it. The collection moves between recognizable fairy tales like The Poisoned Apple and The Little Mermaid, African folklore like Anasi and the Three Trials and The Legend of Princess Yennenga, African American folk tradition with John Henry, the Steel Driving Man, and original stories created by the Bethencourts themselves, including The Cloud Princess and Aku the Sun Maker.
That range means the collection has a different texture than a single-author reimagining. The original stories in particular carry a freshness that the adapted classics occasionally cannot match, because they are not working against listener familiarity with an established version. Aku the Sun Maker and The Cloud Princess have the specific energy of myths being told for the first time, and Bowman handles that freshness with a performance that avoids both the studied gravity of classic storytelling and the self-conscious casualness that can make new mythology feel thin.
Graham’s Range Across Twelve Tracks
Dion Graham is one of the more reliable narrators working in audiobooks, and he brings something distinctive here: the ability to hold mythic weight without making the material feel heavy. His reading of John Henry, the Steel Driving Man has genuine propulsion, and the Princess Yennenga story from Burkina Faso, which many American listeners will be encountering for the first time, gets a treatment that honors its cultural specificity without over-solemizing it. Graham trusts the stories enough to get out of their way when they need momentum.
Where the production is perhaps less sure of itself is in the transitions between stories. The collection’s breadth is also its structural challenge: moving from a reimagined Grimm tale to an original cosmological myth to an African American folk legend in the space of minutes asks a lot of the listener’s orientation, and the audio production does not always give adequate breathing room between pieces. This is a minor complaint but worth noting for listeners who prefer their collections to feel curated rather than simply anthologized.
The Cultural Stakes of This Particular Project
The reviews for CROWNED are notable for how personally many listeners took the material. A grandmother describing her mixed-heritage granddaughter’s delight at finding a mermaid who shared her name. A listener who held on to the physical book for six weeks before giving it as a gift. These responses are not just enthusiasm for a well-made product; they are responses to a collection that is doing something specific about representation, not in the superficial sense of checking boxes, but in the deeper sense of building a mythology that Black children can inhabit.
As an audiobook, CROWNED carries the weight of its visual origins interestingly. CreativeSoul Photography’s work is defined by the lavishness and specificity of its imagery, the hand-made quality of the costuming and staging. The audio version cannot reproduce that, and does not try to. Instead, the narrators have to create the visual richness through voice alone, and Graham and Bowman are well equipped for that task.
Who Should Listen and Who Should Not
Families with children roughly ages five through twelve will find this a rich shared listening experience, and the shorter track lengths make it suitable for car journeys and bedtime listening in installments. Adult listeners who love folklore and fairy tale scholarship will find the collection interesting as a cultural document even without a child audience. Listeners expecting a single coherent narrative will need to recalibrate for anthology mode. Anyone who finds the existing fairy tale canon stuffy will find this a genuinely refreshing alternative.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does the dual-narrator structure work across the different tales in the collection?
Dion Graham handles the more epic and African American folk tradition stories while Mychal-Bella Bowman brings a younger voice to other pieces in the collection. The split feels purposeful rather than arbitrary, and both narrators are fully committed to the material. AudioFile specifically praised their performances as grand and lively.
Are the original stories created by the Bethencourts comparable in quality to the adapted classics?
The original stories, including Aku the Sun Maker and The Cloud Princess, have a freshness that the adapted classics sometimes cannot match precisely because they are not competing with familiar versions. They feel like genuine mythmaking rather than retelling.
Is CROWNED suitable as a standalone audiobook for children who are familiar with the original fairy tales?
Yes, and prior familiarity with the source tales adds rather than detracts. Children who know The Little Mermaid or Sleeping Beauty will notice the deliberate reframings, which can generate good conversations. Children unfamiliar with the source tales will simply encounter these as the stories themselves.
Does the audiobook include any context or framing about the cultural traditions behind the African and African American stories?
The collection is primarily storytelling rather than cultural annotation. The stories are presented with performance rather than scholarly framing, so listeners who want deeper context on traditions like the Anansi stories or the legend of Princess Yennenga will want to supplement the listening with additional reading.
