Brent Hartinger Audiobooks

The Otto Digmore Series: warm, sharp queer fiction from a pioneer of the gay teen novel

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.6/5 average

61 listener ratings

Who is Brent Hartinger?

In 2003, when very few mainstream publishers would touch the subject, Brent Hartinger published a novel about a secret club for gay teenagers at an American high school. Geography Club was his debut, it was later filmed, and it opened a door that had been firmly shut. He was born in 1971 and works as a novelist, playwright and screenwriter.

Rather than leave his characters frozen at seventeen, Hartinger has aged them. Russel Middlebrook, the narrator of that first novel, grew into a separate adult series, and one of his friends, Otto Digmore, eventually walked off with a sequence of his own. Otto is a gay actor with facial scarring from a childhood burn, and the books follow him through the small humiliations and occasional triumphs of trying to work in an industry built on faces.

His register is conversational and generous, funnier than the subject matter suggests, and never solemn about identity for its own sake.

Brent Hartinger in audiobooks

It is the second outing for Otto rather than the first, but The Otto Digmore Decision stands perfectly well on its own. It has gathered a substantial body of listener reviews and holds a strong rating, which tells you how firmly this character lands.

Michael Crouch narrates, and the pairing is a happy one: Crouch is a specialist in contemporary American voices and handles Otto’s self deprecation without ever tipping it into pity. At under eight hours it is an easy afternoon, and a good introduction to a strand of fiction that is warm, funny and unshowy about its politics. If you have not met Otto before, nothing here will leave you stranded.

The audiobook is below, and Otto is very good company for the length of a journey.