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    Whistling Toilets
    Whistling Toilets
    Whistling Toilets
    Audiobook5 hours

    Whistling Toilets

    Written by Randy Powell

    Narrated by Johnny Heller

    3/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    When 16-year-old Stan Claxton learns that his neighbor Ginny Forrester is coming home, he isn't sure if he should be happy or scared. Ginny-a 15-year-old nationally-ranked junior tennis player-is having trouble with her game, and her coach thinks Stan can pull her out of this slump. After an awkward beginning, Stan settles in as Ginny's coach, and her play improves with each match in a local tournament. But even as she advances to the finals, Ginny won't share the dark secret that is jeopardizing her future. Can Stan help her, or is the mysterious song of the whistling toilets her only hope? A nationwide favorite of parents and teenagers alike, author Randy Powell has earned ALA Best Book of the Year honors for Dean Duffy and Is Kissing a Girl who Smokes Like Licking an Ashtray? Narrator Johnny Heller's enthusiastic reading style fully captures all the humor and pressures of growing up.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateOct 24, 2008
    ISBN9781436183208
    Whistling Toilets
    Author

    Randy Powell

    Randy Powell I've lived in Seattle all my life -- since 1956. I live here now with my wife, Judy, and our two sons, Eli and Drew. I like the outdoors, books, fresh crab and raw oysters, and rain. As a kid, I was crazy about sports. All sports. When I wasn't playing the real thing, I was playing some imaginary form of it. I wasn't a great athlete, just obsessed. I peaked when I was eleven. Our little league football team won the city championship, and the coach gave me the game ball. I lost that ball a few years later. I'm still looking for it. I had fun reading and writing. When I found a book I liked, I threw myself into it, into the main character's skin. I'd try to write in the author's style. Writing was hard work, but what a rush it gave me, coming up with the right phrase, finishing a piece and feeling it click, reading it to the class and getting some laughs. In high school, in the early 1970s, my hero was Arthur Ashe, the tennis pro. I concentrated on tennis and worked hard at it, but not hard enough. Today it's still my game of choice, and I still don't work hard enough. High school is also where I became serious about writing. I became even more so in college, at the University of Washington. I made two trips to Europe, worked summers in Alaska as a deckhand on a fishing boat, and wrote short stories, novels, and even formula romances. After college, I got a job teaching at an alternative school for junior high and high school dropouts. I taught for four years and loved it, but finally left because it ate up my writing time. My breakthrough in writing came when I learned to look inside myself and write about the things I cared and felt deeply about. I guess it was only natural that my first published novel, My Underrated Year, should be about a high school football and tennis player. Yes, there's a lot of myself in that book, although hardly any of the incidents actually happened. That's true of my other books as well. I enjoy visiting schools and talking to students about writing. I also love hearing from readers. You can write to me in care of my publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I promise I'll write back!

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    Reviews for Whistling Toilets

    3/5

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    • 3/5
      When underachiever Stan Claxton is recruited to coach his best friend, Ginny, a nationally ranked junior tennis player, through a local tournament, he is also supposed to find out why she has recently fallen into a slump. As he tries to lend his support, he begins to discover new feelings for her and considers sharing his secret of the whistling toilets.It's a good enough story as far as it goes and I like the dialog for the most part. The Stan and his buddies when they are together talk like guys, and his conversations with Ginny are meandering, often talking around the point the way most conversations do. The secret of the whistling toilets was left almost to the end, and the whole time I was reading I was wondering if the revelation would turn out to be a disappointment after the long build up. It wasn't any great thing. I think I might have been disappointed had I read this years ago when I first grabbed it, because I woukd have been expecting someting miraculous. Now, I think the discovery worked for what it was.What really kind of killed it was the final scene in the book, which just sort of socks you in the chest and leaves you hanging. Honestly, one more paragraph, maybe even just an additional sentence would have made the ending stronger and brought things to a more satisfying conclusion. Either that or take out the last scene altogether, because though I like it, it ends things on a sour note. I mean, really, it just goes to show how important an ending is, because this book would have been so much better with just small changes.