- Performance: Abby Craden brings quiet authority and emotional restraint to Susan's story, capturing the tension between a woman's internal awakening and the external pressures bearing down on her.
- What it covers: Awakening sexuality and identity, the courage to leave, friendship as the beginning of love
- Feel: Warm and emotionally absorbing, with the unhurried pace of a relationship that grows from genuine connection
- Our call: Gerri Hill's early lesbian romance holds up beautifully in audio form, and Craden's narration honors the emotional authenticity that has made Hill a foundational name in the genre.
Susan Sterling arrives at the family cabin in Kings Canyon National Park carrying the full weight of a marriage she needs to escape. Gerri Hill's Dawn of Change, narrated by Abby Craden across six hours and twenty-six minutes, is an audiobook that opens in that moment of flight: a woman who has run out of room inside her own life and found the only door marked exit leads to a mountain cabin and, unexpectedly, to Shawn Weber. What follows is one of Hill's most emotionally restrained novels, a slow-building friendship that becomes something else entirely before either woman has found the vocabulary for what is happening between them. This audiobook belongs to a tradition of lesbian romance that earns its emotional payoffs through patience rather than intensity.
Hill is a foundational figure in contemporary lesbian fiction. She has published more than forty novels across a career that began in the late 1990s, and Dawn of Change is among her earlier works. That origin matters because the book has the qualities of foundational genre writing: the character dynamics are clear, the emotional stakes are high, and the romance follows an arc that feels both inevitable and genuinely earned. Reviewer Carroll A. Reynolds described Hill as possessing a gift that translates into books readers understand and ask for more, and that gift is evident in how the relationship between Susan and Shawn develops across the novel's six-plus hours of audio.
A Closer Look at Dawn of Change
Abby Craden is one of the narrators most consistently associated with lesbian fiction, and her work on Dawn of Change reflects why. She reads Susan's internal conflict with a quality that is easy to underestimate: restraint. Susan is not a woman who processes her feelings dramatically. She is someone who has spent twenty years inside a set of assumptions about who she is and what her life should look like, and the experience of questioning those assumptions is rendered in Craden's narration as something quiet and enormous simultaneously. That dual quality, the enormous thing happening very quietly, is the emotional register the book requires, and Craden finds it with consistent accuracy throughout the six hours.
The setting is also doing real work in this story. Kings Canyon National Park as a narrative space creates the conditions for the relationship to develop outside of the social pressures that define Susan's life in her regular world. The mountain environment strips away the signals and roles her ordinary life requires her to maintain, which is why the friendship between Susan and Shawn can grow into something different. Hill uses landscape as a narrative tool rather than decoration, and Craden's narration gives the descriptions of the park enough texture to make the setting feel consequential rather than merely scenic in the audio version of the story.
What Makes Dawn of Change Worth Hearing
Reviewer Agnes H. Hagadus described this as an old-fashioned romance in the best sense: a reluctant friendship that becomes trust and then love across a series of weekend encounters in the mountains. That description positions the audiobook accurately within the spectrum of lesbian romance. This is not a book driven by conflict or plot complexity. It is driven by the internal experience of two women discovering who they are to each other, and the audio format is ideally suited to that kind of intimate, interior storytelling. Craden's narration makes Susan's perspective accessible without requiring the listener to work hard to inhabit it.
The novel also engages seriously with the social and family pressure that Susan faces when her feelings for Shawn become undeniable. Reviewer Jen Bunny Bear captured this with lines from the novel that speak to the cost of claiming happiness that your family does not recognize or sanction. Hill does not soften the reality that choosing Shawn means forsaking the social world Susan has known, and the audiobook honors that weight. Reviewer Reynolds noted seeing personal parallels in the story, observing how Hill combines the experience of discovering one's sexuality with the experience of family members who do not understand or acknowledge what they cannot see, which speaks to the book's representative value within the LGBTQ community and its history.
Things to Know Before Starting Dawn of Change
Dawn of Change is one of Hill's earlier novels, and readers familiar with her more recent work may notice that the pacing is deliberately slow. The novel takes its time with the friendship before allowing the romantic feelings to surface, which is true to the characters' psychological reality but may test the patience of listeners who want the romantic plot to move faster. The length of the friendship phase, which constitutes the majority of the audiobook, is a deliberate structural choice rather than a failure to develop the romance efficiently or a sign that later payoffs do not arrive.
The antagonist forces in the novel, Susan's husband and the family pressure to reconcile, are rendered at a distance. They apply pressure from offscreen rather than generating direct confrontation, which keeps the novel's focus on Susan's internal experience rather than external conflict. Listeners who prefer romance narratives with more active plot tension will find the interpersonal drama here quieter than they might prefer. Those who value emotional depth over action pacing will find the balance well-calibrated for the kind of story Hill is telling, one in which the most important events are interior rather than external.
Who Gerri Hill Is Writing For
This audiobook is well suited to readers of lesbian romance and women's fiction who appreciate emotionally patient storytelling, who value the slow development of a relationship from friendship through something more, and who are drawn to narratives about women discovering their identity and finding the courage to live authentically. It is also a strong entry point for readers new to Gerri Hill's catalog, offering a clear illustration of the qualities that have made her one of the genre's most consistently appreciated authors over more than two decades. Listeners who want fast-paced romantic tension or explicit content will find this a quieter and more emotionally interior novel than those preferences require. The 4.5 rating from 370 listeners reflects a genuine reader consensus about Hill's quality and Craden's narration working together effectively.
