Louise Allen Audiobooks

Thrown Away Children: Diego's Story, a real-life account read by Melanie Crawley

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.2/5 average

15 listener ratings

Who is Louise Allen?

Naming a series Thrown Away Children is not a neutral act. The phrase is an accusation, and it sets the terms for everything filed beneath it, including Diego’s Story, which follows the pattern the sequence uses: a child’s name on the cover, and a life told at the length it deserves rather than the length that would be comfortable.

Louise Allen writes these accounts, and our catalogue shelves this one across memoir, personal development and, rather more debatably, crime and thriller. The memoir shelf is the one to trust. Work of this kind belongs to a well-established tradition of first-person writing about difficult childhoods, a tradition that has found a large and committed readership precisely because it refuses to make the material easier than it actually was.

Louise Allen in audiobooks

Melanie Crawley reads, at a shade under seven hours. Narration counts for an unusual amount in testimony of this sort: the voice has to carry hard material without either dramatising it or flattening it into a report, and the margin between those two failures is narrow.

The listener sample here is small, so the score is best read as encouragement rather than evidence. Come to it as you would any first-person account of a childhood that went badly wrong, with the understanding that it will not be a comfortable listen and was never meant to be. What we hold is gathered below.