Children's ✦ Penny’s Take 🎧 Audiobook
Some Kind of Courage
Dan Gemeinhart · 2016
🎙 Narrated by Andrew Eiden
80/100
👍 Worth It
Gemeinhart's 1890s search for a stolen pony turns into a real gut-punch of a book — grief, a hard-won cross-cultural friendship, and genuine peril, all handled with WSJ-praised craft. It runs intense in places (a shooting, layered loss), so it skews toward the older end of its 9-14 range. Andrew Eiden's narration is a genuine highlight, specifically praised for its authentic 1890s Western twang — worth the listen for the performance alone.
✦ Penny’s Take — this is The Review Group’s own editorial assessment. Penny’s analytical review line researched this book from real sources and scored it across the lenses shown below. It’s an honest first-party read — not a page-by-page personal one. The gold ✓ Penny Tested mark is reserved for books Penny reads cover to cover herself.
⚠ Parent note — our reviewers flagged: contains a shooting and grief over multiple family deaths — may be intense for the younger end of the 9-14 range · depicts historical anti-Chinese prejudice, which benefits from adult discussion. We still scored it 80; these are context for your family, not an automatic skip.
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🎙 Narration: excellent Andrew Eiden specifically praised for capturing authentic 1890s Washington State vernacular and a Western twang.
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Show the math
Verdict receipt0–100
Faith & family safety68
Substance / usefulness85
Craft & writing85
Originality78
Evidence & accuracy80
Hype vs delivers78
Age-fit70
Human-eye read80
Penny’s verdict80
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