At a Glance
- Narration: A separate reader for every story, fourteen of them named in the table of contents, though the credit line itself says only full cast.
- Themes: Everyday courage, kindness as heroism, own-voices storytelling across cultures and neighborhoods
- Mood: Warm and varied, thirteen short pieces at thirteen different temperatures
- Verdict: The kind of anthology a classroom actually uses, uneven by nature and worth it for the range of voices alone.
How many voices should a short story anthology get? This audiobook answers with fourteen, one for each piece plus the foreword, and the table of contents on the listing names every reader against every story. The credit line, meanwhile, offers two words: full cast. That gap between the metadata and the description is the first thing worth understanding about this Listening Library production of the We Need Diverse Books anthology, which came out in July 2019.
Our Take on The Hero Next Door
Bravery is the organizing idea, and the collection defines it generously. Not all heroes wear capes, the description says: some teach martial arts, others talk to ghosts, a few are inventors or soccer players. They are also sisters, neighbors and friends. What holds thirteen very different pieces together is a shared claim that small acts of kindness can save the day, which is a modest thesis for a book about heroism and a far more useful one for the age group it addresses.
Thirteen stories arrive from writers with substantial reputations of their own. Rita Williams-Garcia, Linda Sue Park, Lamar Giles, Hena Khan, Joseph Bruchac, Juana Medina, Mike Jung, Ellen Oh, Cynthia Leitich Smith, Ronald L. Smith and William Alexander all contribute, alongside Anna Dobbin and short story contest winner Suma Subramaniam. It comes from We Need Diverse Books, the organization behind Flying Lessons and Other Stories, and it follows that collection rather than standing entirely on its own. Contest winner is no courtesy label either: Subramaniam earned a place beside the writers the description credits for Wonder, One Crazy Summer and A Long Walk to Water, which is a formidable room to be published into.
One name in the promotional copy never appears in the contents. R. J. Palacio, author of Wonder, is listed first among the featured contributors, and yet the table of contents printed further down the same page credits no story to Palacio while giving two to Suma Subramaniam. The description also promises thirteen acclaimed authors while naming fourteen. Neither discrepancy is fatal, but a buyer shopping for one specific writer should read the contents list instead of the blurb.
Why Listen to The Hero Next Door
Short stories are the format audio was built for, particularly with young listeners. Each piece ends on its own terms, so a genuine stopping point arrives regularly and nobody has to carry a plot across a week of bedtimes. A child who loses the thread of a novel is usually finished with that novel. A child who loses interest in one story here waits a few minutes and gets a different voice, a different setting and a different kind of hero.
M. Schmidt's five-star review makes that case better than any publisher pitch. The eleven-year-old in that household, a committed nonfiction reader, was not especially taken with the collection, and the short format is exactly what made it work anyway. The same review singles out The Assist, by Linda Sue Park and Anna Dobbin, as true to middle school life, and reports the family actually using the essay-writing technique described inside the story. Few short stories manage that.
Casting a different reader for every story is the right production decision and an expensive one. Fourteen performers are named against fourteen entries, from the foreword through to the closing piece, which means each author's voice reaches you filtered through a separate performance rather than one narrator's approximation of thirteen styles. For an anthology whose entire premise is a range of perspectives, matching a single voice to a single story is not decoration. It is the argument.
What to Watch For in The Hero Next Door
Lauren V. supplies the dissent, and it deserves a hearing. That four-star review found the first collection awesome and this one merely okay, not bad but not excellent, with the rating pushed from three up to four by one story that produced tears during a shared read with a child. Anthologies are uneven by design, and anyone who loved Flying Lessons should arrive expecting a comparison rather than a repeat performance.
Not one of the visible reviews mentions the audio. Across five entries covering classrooms, family reading and a comparison with the earlier book, nobody comments on any of the fourteen performances, and several describe reading the stories on the page instead of hearing them. That is a real hole in the record for a production whose principal selling point is its cast, so the 4.6 average grades the writing and leaves the listening entirely unrated.
Counting is the other thing this page handles loosely. Fourteen readers are named, thirteen stories are listed alongside a foreword, and the copy claims thirteen authors while listing fourteen contributors. None of this misleads a buyer in any material way, and anthologies with contest winners and co-written pieces are genuinely awkward to tally. Even so, on a page whose main job is telling you who is inside the book, the arithmetic ought to hold together.
Who Should Listen to The Hero Next Door
Families with middle-grade readers are the target, and classrooms are the obvious second audience. pj's five-star review says simply that it is great for the middle school classroom, which fits both the length of the pieces and the discussion each one invites. It also suits any household trying to widen a child's reading beyond one favorite author, since thirteen writers in a single file is an efficient way to work out who the next favorite will be. Teachers get a further advantage: a story short enough to play in one period, with an author worth looking up afterward attached to it.
Two groups will get less out of it. Anyone hoping for one sustained story will find the constant resetting frustrating, because thirteen beginnings mean thirteen new casts of characters to place and thirteen new worlds to accept. And a listener who came specifically for a headline author should confirm that author appears in the contents first, since at least one writer headlined in the blurb is missing from the story list entirely.
Fourteen readers for one children's anthology is the sort of production decision usually reserved for prestige fiction, and seeing it applied to middle-grade short stories is genuinely cheering. The collection is uneven, the way anthologies tend to be, and the page around it counts badly. What it gets right is the thing that matters most to a young listener still deciding whether books are for them: thirteen different ways to be brave, and thirteen different voices saying so.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who reads the stories in The Hero Next Door audiobook?
Fourteen performers share it, one per entry. Adenrele Ojo reads the foreword, and Caitlin Gold, Dominic Hoffman, Kirby Heyborne, Erin Cahill, Kristen Ariza, Renee Dorian, Chris Browning, Laura Ortiz, Maxwell Glick, Taylor Meskimen, Dylan Moore, Frankie Corzo and Mike Chamberlain each take a story. The credit itself lists not one of them.
Do I need the earlier We Need Diverse Books audiobook first?
No. This follows Flying Lessons and Other Stories from the same organization, but the two share an approach rather than characters or continuity. Each story here stands alone, and nothing in the collection assumes you read the previous one. Reviewers who know both simply compare them.
How varied are the thirteen stories?
Considerably. One five-star reviewer describes every story as having a different flavor and its own characters to connect with, then says they want to read more from each of the authors. Martial arts, ghosts, inventors and soccer players all turn up, which gives a rough sense of the range.
How long is each story?
The full recording runs six hours and thirteen minutes across thirteen stories plus a foreword, so individual pieces are short by design. The listing does not break out running times story by story, but the arithmetic points to something comfortably shorter than a bedtime, which is the whole idea.
