The rating badge on this listing cannot be built from the votes behind it. Six ratings, a displayed average of 4.4, and no combination of whole stars across six votes produces that figure under any rounding convention you care to apply. Something in the pipeline is pooling scores from somewhere else. Mention it first because it is the only untrustworthy thing on the page: the rest of this audiobook listing, from five detailed reviews to a strong reader credit, holds up perfectly well once you stop looking at the number.
Is Wild Game Worth Your Time?
Malabar wakes her fourteen-year-old daughter at midnight on a hot July night on Cape Cod and says five words: Ben Souther just kissed me. The whole memoir is contained in that moment and in what follows it, which is not shock or refusal but recruitment. Adrienne becomes the confidante, then the helpmate, then the person who helps orchestrate an affair between her mother and the closest friend of her mother's husband. Ben Souther is the friend in question, and the arrangement runs on for years with a teenager holding the logistics together.
Adrienne blossoms in the sudden light of that attention, which is the sentence in the publisher's copy that explains why the book exists. A child chosen as an accomplice is still a child being chosen, and the warmth of it is what makes the damage so slow to surface. The consequences arrive years later: a precarious marriage of her own, a deep depression, and eventually the strength to hold onto both her life and her mother on terms she sets.
Cover design by Christopher Moisan is the last line of the description, which tells you the copy on this audio listing was lifted from a printed jacket without editing. Harmless, and quietly informative: the words selling you this recording were written for a hardback, which is also why the description reads as literary positioning rather than as anything about the listening experience. No runtime note, no mention of who reads it, no indication that an audio edition was ever considered while the copy was being drafted.
The Best Parts of Wild Game
Julia Whelan takes the reader credit, which is the strongest argument this page makes for the audio edition over the print one. A memoir written in first person by someone who is not performing it presents a specific problem: the voice has to sound like confession without sounding like impersonation, and it has to hold a fourteen-year-old and a woman looking back at fourteen inside the same register. That is a technical assignment rather than a reading job, and it is the reason to choose this edition over the page. The memoir also spends its first act inside a secret, which means the performance has to keep a confidence with the listener that the fourteen-year-old is keeping with her mother, and then let it curdle without ever announcing the change.
Three separate reviewers reach for the same comparison without prompting. Amber FLYNN calls it a memoir that reads like a novel. The Amazon Customer review says the same thing in almost the same words. Johanne Picard places it among the best of the introspective mother-daughter memoirs and reports finishing it in a single overnight sitting. That consensus matters for the audio edition specifically, because a memoir that moves like a story survives continuous listening, while a reflective one asks to be put down every twenty minutes. Eight hours is short enough to finish inside a week without the momentum leaking away, which this structure needs, since the pleasure early on is complicity and complicity does not survive long pauses.
Before You Commit to Wild Game
One review contains a trap worth naming. The four-star entry from alda wishes for more about the personal life of the narrator, aside from the relationship with Malabar. In context that word means Adrienne, the first person of the memoir, and not Julia Whelan at the microphone. The two senses collide constantly in reviews of memoir recordings, and this listing shows the collision cleanly: nobody in the column is discussing the performance at all, and the one apparent reference to a narrator is about the author.
Krick, at three stars, writes the most physically honest review on the page and the most useful warning. The beginning of the book produced a stomachache. What the mother asked is described as monstrous and selfish, and the review admits the book was hard to pick up and hard to keep going with. That reaction is not a failure of the writing; it is the writing working. Anyone with a complicated parent should know that in advance rather than eight hours in. The three-star grade attached to that review is not a verdict on quality either, which is worth saying plainly, since the body of it describes a book doing exactly what it set out to do.
Eight hours and nineteen minutes gives the story room to move past the affair into the wreckage, and alda's dissent lands in that second half: the book starts like an intriguing novel and then fizzes a little. That is a fair description of what happens when a memoir leaves its dramatic premise behind for the slower business of consequences. Pair it with the phrase Krick lifts from the text, the dark gifts a mother gave, and you have the whole shape of the thing. The publisher's copy says as much in its own terms, describing the lies people tell to justify their choices and the fact that the people closest to us are the ones positioned to break our hearts.
Should You Listen to Wild Game?
Memoir listeners who want the mother-daughter book that goes further than the usual arrangement of grievances are the natural audience. So are readers of literary fiction who normally avoid memoir, given how consistently this one gets described as a novel by the people who finished it. Amber FLYNN wishes for having had it as a young woman, which is a particular kind of recommendation, and the Amazon Customer review recommends it flatly to any woman while disclaiming any snobbery about literary writing. Between them they describe a wider readership than a book this specific usually finds.
Anyone in the middle of an active fight with a parent should choose the timing carefully, and anyone looking for a redemption arc that resolves cleanly will find something more ambivalent. Whelan makes the eight hours go quickly, and the badge above the reviews is the single element on this page worth ignoring completely.
Before You Listen
Why does the star rating look wrong on this audiobook?
Because the arithmetic does not work. The page shows six ratings and an average of 4.4, and no set of six whole-star votes averages to that under any rounding convention. The score appears to be pooled from another edition, so treat the written reviews as the real evidence.
Does Julia Whelan narrate the whole memoir?
Yes, Whelan holds the sole reader credit for all eight hours and nineteen minutes. The assignment is harder than it looks: a first-person memoir performed by someone other than its author has to sound confessional without tipping into impersonation, and has to carry both the teenager and the adult remembering her.
Do the reviews say anything about the audiobook performance?
Not one of them does. The single mention of a narrator comes from a four-star review wishing for more about that narrator's personal life, which means the memoirist rather than the reader. Five detailed reviews discuss the writing, the mother, and Cape Cod, and none discuss the recording.
How difficult is the subject matter?
Difficult enough that one reviewer describes a physical reaction to the opening chapters and calls the mother's request monstrous. The material covers parental exploitation of a fourteen-year-old, complicity, a failed marriage and depression. The writing is warm rather than lurid, which is part of what makes it uncomfortable.
