Courtney Sheinmel Audiobooks

Six years as a lawyer came first. Courtney Sheinmel, born in Stanford, California, in 1977, grew up between the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City, read English at Barnard and then took a law degree at Fordham before the writing finally won out. Her first novel, My So-Called Family, appeared in 2008, and she has written full time ever since.

Her range is unusual. For older readers she has tackled subjects most authors circle warily, including Positively, a 2009 novel about a teenager living with HIV that grew out of her work with the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. For younger children she writes with a much lighter hand, and it is here that she has been most prolific, with dozens of short books built for the moment a child first reads alone.

The through line is respect. Sheinmel does not talk down, does not tidy away awkward feelings, and lets her young characters be silly and serious inside the same chapter. She lives in New York City.

The sweet shop is the heart of it. Stella Batts, whose family owns one, narrates her own small catastrophes with tremendous confidence, and Cassandra Morris reads the series with exactly the right energy: quick, indignant, entirely eight years old.

Ratings run high across the run, with A Case of the Meanies and Stella Batts Needs a New Name drawing the most listener reviews and Broken Birthday taking the warmest scores. Start with Stella Batts Needs a New Name, which sets up the shop, the little sister and the friendship politics that power everything after it. Then take them in whatever order you fancy: Superstar, Pardon Me, Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow, Something Blue, Scaredy Cat and None of Your Beeswax each run between ninety minutes and two hours, which is one car journey or two bedtimes.

Pick a title below and set the shop bell ringing.