Denise and I had a deal for our Saturday lakefront walk: she picks the playlist, I pick the audiobook. She vetoed my Middlemarch re-listen (fair, honestly), so I came back with Lynn Austin's The Strength of His Hand, the third book in her Chronicles of the Kings series. Denise lasted about forty minutes before she was asking me to slow down so she could hear more. That's my informal metric for a good audiobook. Better than any star rating I could give.
I should say upfront: I came to this one cold. I hadn't read the first two books in the series, and I was genuinely curious whether Austin would drop you into Hezekiah's Jerusalem and leave you treading water. She doesn't. The setup is efficient without feeling like a summary. You get the king at what should be his peak - Judah is stable, the temple is restored, Yahweh worship is the law of the land - and then Austin starts quietly pulling threads. His wife may be barren. His pagan-worshiping nephew might inherit the throne he's spent his entire reign protecting. And then the queen's secrets surface, and suddenly the political drama has a very human, very private wound at its center.
What Austin does that I'd tell my AP Literature students to study - if any of them would actually listen, which, let's be honest, they wouldn't - is that she refuses to let Hezekiah be simply heroic. He's a man who has done genuinely righteous things and genuinely cannot stop tallying them up. There's a particular kind of spiritual pride that's harder to write than outright villainy, because the person committing it isn't wrong about their accomplishments. They're just wrong about what those accomplishments entitle them to. Austin gets that tension exactly right, and it gives the whole book a moral complexity that you don't always expect from faith-based historical fiction.
What Suzanne Toren Understands That Most Narrators Don't
Suzanne Toren is a Golden Voice inductee, Scourby Award winner, and - after eleven and a half hours with her - I understand why. But I want to be specific about what she does, because 'warm and intelligent' is how you describe a good librarian, not a great narrator.
Toren reads Austin's prose the way I tell my students to read Hemingway: she trusts the sentence to do the work. She doesn't editorialize with her voice. When Hezekiah is in anguish, she doesn't perform anguish at you - she reads the words that contain the anguish, and she lets them land. The pause before a character's name in a moment of reckoning. The slight flattening of tone when someone is lying to themselves. These are choices. The narrator understands that pause is punctuation, and Toren uses it like a writer would.
I listened at 1.0x. My students think this makes me ancient. I think it means I actually heard what Austin wrote.
The Part Where I Have to Be Honest About What This Is
This is faith-based historical fiction, which means it's doing two things simultaneously: it's trying to be a serious literary engagement with the Old Testament world, and it's trying to be spiritually edifying for a Christian readership. Most of the time, Austin manages both. Occasionally, the edification wins, and a scene that could've stayed in moral ambiguity gets resolved a little too cleanly.
If you're coming to this as a secular reader who loves historical fiction - I'd put it alongside Geraldine Brooks's The Secret Chord as Old Testament literary fiction worth your time, though Brooks is darker and less interested in consolation. I've wandered further afield in my reading lately - Wedding Dress is about as far from Hezekiah's Jerusalem as you can get, but it surprised me with how seriously it took its characters' inner lives, which is rarer than it should be. If you're coming to this as a reader of faith who wants something that takes the text seriously rather than sentimentalizing it, Austin is doing real work here. The portrait of a nation learning what it means to worship one God - not just legally, but actually - is more interesting than the back-cover summary suggests.
My students would hate this. The pacing is deliberate, the stakes are spiritual as much as political, and there's no algorithm feeding them the next episode. I love it for exactly those reasons.
Worth Pausing the Faculty Meeting For?
Yes. This one I'd have listened to even if Principal Martinez had been saying something interesting. The combination of Austin's moral seriousness and Toren's disciplined, warm narration makes for eleven hours that feel earned rather than consumed. It's not a book that grabs you by the collar. It's one that sits down next to you on a lakefront bench and stays for the whole walk home.
