This book is not what I expected to be listening to while folding tiny socks at 1 PM on a Tuesday. But Sophie was napping (miracle), the laundry was warm, and I'd grabbed it because the description mentioned kids and mystery and it was under 8 hours. Done in a week? Try done in four days. And now I have... feelings.
Here's the thing - One Safe Place is technically a middle grade book. My Emma is 7, almost the right age for this. And I spent most of the listen thinking about whether I'd hand it to her and landed on "not yet, but soon." Because Tania Unsworth wrote something that's genuinely unsettling in the way the best kids' dystopian fiction is - not graphic, but the kind of creepy that crawls under your skin and sets up camp.
A Scorched World Through a Kid's Eyes
Devin grows up farming dead land with his grandfather after the world got hot. That's it - that's the setup. No elaborate worldbuilding exposition dump, no info scrolls. Just a boy and his grandpa and cracked earth. When grandpa dies and Devin ends up in the city, the contrast hit me hard - all these glass buildings and abandoned kids scrounging on the streets. Unsworth doesn't spell out every detail of how society collapsed. She just shows you the wreckage through Devin's eyes, and honestly? That restraint is what makes it work. Your brain fills in the gaps and it's worse than anything she could've written.
The "one safe place" itself - this home for abandoned children with unlimited food and toys and the promise of a new family - gave me immediate alarm bells. Obviously. I'm a grown woman. But the slow reveal of what's actually happening there is genuinely well-paced. The kids start getting this zombie-like sickness, and the administrator is giving off vibes that made me pause my folding more than once. The gradual resistance the children build against what's happening to them? That's where the emotional gut-punch lives. These are kids fighting back with basically nothing, and I kept thinking about my own three and - yeah. Got a little intense over the laundry basket.
Mark Turetsky Gets the Suspense Right (Mostly)
Okay, the narration. Mark Turetsky has this intense quality to his voice that really works for the suspense. He drops little hints about the home's true purpose lightly enough that you catch them but don't feel beaten over the head. When Devin hits his panic moments, Turetsky's delivery genuinely ratcheted up my heart rate.
But - and this is where I have to be honest - there were stretches where it felt like someone reading to me rather than performing. You know the difference? Like when your kid's teacher reads aloud versus when a storyteller performs at the library? Turetsky lives somewhere between those two, leaning more toward the teacher side. The quirky side characters especially kind of blurred together vocally. I'd come back after a Sophie interruption (she found markers, don't ask) and struggle to place which kid was talking. For a book with multiple children who matter to the plot, that's a real problem.
Survived 47 pauses and still made sense - but only because the PLOT is clear. The character voices? Less so.
The Slow Burn That Actually Pays Off
Fair warning: it starts slow. Like, really slow. The grandfather section and Devin's early time in the city take their time, and I almost switched to something else during morning drop-off on day one. I'm glad I didn't. Once Devin gets to the home, the pacing shifts and Unsworth starts unraveling the mystery with this deliberate, careful hand that kept me sitting in my car in the garage an extra fifteen minutes. The horror of what the home actually is - I won't spoil it, but it's the kind of premise that makes you want to immediately go hug your kids.
This is Unsworth's first book for young readers (she's Barry Unsworth's daughter, which - literary pedigree, okay) and it reads like someone who respects kids enough to scare them appropriately. Not gratuitously. But honestly.
Who Gets the Car Time
If your kids are 9+ and loved The Giver or The City of Ember, this is their next listen. If YOU want something that's technically middle grade but will genuinely creep you out in a satisfying way, grab it. It's 7.5 hours - perfectly manageable.
Skip it if you need strong character differentiation in audio (the narration won't help you there) or if you're looking for a comfort read. This is not comfort. This is a book that made me hold Sophie a little tighter after nap time and spend twenty minutes thinking about what we owe children in a broken world. I had a completely different kind of unsettled feeling after 100 — lighter stakes, but that same low-grade dread about where the world is headed.
Not groundbreaking, but sometimes you don't need groundbreaking. Sometimes you need a story that reminds you why you'd burn the whole world down for your kids. At 1.25x, it moved just right.
Made me cry at school pickup. Worth it though.
