The Best Audiobooks for a Family Road Trip

Thanks for putting together your top audiobook recommendations for a family road trip. It’s very helpful for people looking to make a long journey more enjoyable.

We’ve gone on lots of different family car rides — it was fun to remember what audiobooks really worked well for us all to listen to together. Car rides can be a good way to introduce kids to audiobooks, because there’s not much else going on. Even if it’s a long car ride with tablets out, too, it can be a good break to have everybody listening to something together and talking about it. And if you have kids who don’t like being in the car, it can be helpful if you’re listening to the story only in the car, that gives them something to look forward to.

Who gets to choose the story before you set out on a journey?

I usually have something in mind that we can all agree on. My eldest daughter is probably the most opinionated, driving us certain ways with what we’re listening to, but it’s usually something that we’ll all like.

Most of the audiobooks that I thought about are the start of a series. It can help to have a series to listen to, with more stories that you know you’ll want to hear what happens next. If you find an author and a narrator that you really like, that can definitely carry you through a long journey. So if you find a series that you really like, you can look forward to the next story.

Your first pick is The Misfits: A Royal Conundrum. That’s a new series, the first book came out in 2024.

Yes, it started last year. We listened to that while we were driving up to Canada to go ice skating. I loved listening to it with the kids. It’s got a good mix of mystery and adventure, but it also is very silly. My youngest was eight years old when we listened to it, and the level of peril that you encounter isn’t too great.

Yes, The Misfits looks like it has a humorous tone.

It’s really funny! Lisa Yee is the author, and Cindy Kay narrates the audiobook. She did a really nice job of taking what could be a really goofy story seriously. It’s not like she’s making fun of what’s going on, so you can be really invested in the audiobook while still laughing at some of the plot lines. It’s about a girl who finds out she’s getting sent to a school that’s out on an island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. When she’s there she gets recruited into a top-secret team of crime fighters. She’s getting trained in spy techniques by martial artists and a ballerina (because balance is important when you’re a spy) and they encounter a whole cast of characters.

It was a lot of fun to listen to together, we were all invested in whether they were going to be able to pull it off and protect the school. The second book, The Misfits: A Copycat Conundrum, just came out. We are saving that for our next family road trip.

Your next audiobook pick for a family road trip is Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky, which is part of the Rick Riordan Presents imprint of fantasy adventures featuring mythology and folklore from around the world.

Yes! I work at a library, too, and we often have kids coming in looking for a good fantasy book, who perhaps liked reading Percy Jackson. The Rick Riordan Presents imprint has been so helpful for finding kids new books to try. Those books are always good options to point to when thinking about what else they might like to read, because they’re published for fans of stories that mix fantasy and mythology and folklore. They are really popular, and a great way to introduce kids to different cultures.

Tristan Strong was one that we listened to together. The narrator is Amir Abdullah. He is taking this story very seriously and also bringing some pretty ridiculous characters to life for you to listen to. I read it and then I listened to it, and I felt like it came so much more to life listening to the narration of it.

It’s the story of Tristan Strong going into this whole other world adjacent to ours, where there are African American and West African gods who are characters that he meets. One of the people who helps him on his journey is Gum Baby, who is from different African folklore stories. She looks like a doll, but she does not want to be called a doll. She’s covered in sap, has this really high-pitched falsetto voice, and says some really ridiculous things. Amir’s narration of her is so over the top that you can’t help but laugh. But there’s a lot of more serious stuff in the story, too. There’s grief and dealing with loss, and a lot of adventure, but it definitely has a lightness to it. That’s a series that’s complete; there are three books, so you can listen to all of them.

And the audiobooks kept all the listeners’ interest across the whole trilogy?

They did, definitely. There’s a lot going on, different storylines across the series, so you want to pay attention as you’re listening. It was a good family listen. I’d say 9-13 would probably be the right age range for the Tristan Strong books.

Your next family road trip audiobook pick is the award-winning Sal & Gabi Break the Universe.

This one is an all-time family favourite. It’s also in the Rick Riordan Presents imprint, but it’s more science fiction than fantasy.

There is a sequel called Sal & Gabi Fix the Universe, which is reassuring.

Yes, the two books are a great pair. Carlos Hernandez is the author, and I really hope we get to see more from him for kids, because these are so good. They’re narrated by Anthony Rey Perez, who — like the characters in the book — is a Cuban American from Miami, so he’s able to draw on family voices and neighbourhood voices that he grew up with.

It’s so funny, while also dealing with some more serious subjects. The main character, Sal, has type one diabetes and so did his mother, who died before the start of the book. While he was learning meditation techniques for helping to cope with his grief, he figured out how to rip holes into other universes and pull things through, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally. At the very beginning he’s starting out at a new school, and there’s somebody who’s being a bully to him. He winds up pulling a dead chicken into that bully’s locker from a chicken processing factory that’s nearby in another universe, and that sets off a chain of events. He makes friends with Gabi, a girl who’s investigating how he could possibly have done this ridiculous magical thing.

There’s a lot of sweetness to the story, and it’s really funny. There are different characters that are AI-enhanced devices that have got their own strong personalities. There’s a talking toilet, and a machine he becomes friends with that his dad is using to investigate multiverse theory. It’s great! When people are looking for a funny kids’ book to listen to, that’s definitely one that I recommend.

Next up is Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods. This author has written a lot of fantasy, for adults and young adults as well.

Yes, the author is Catherynne Valente. And it’s read by Heath Miller. He’s got a great Australian accent, but in this book he’s mostly doing a British accent, and one of the characters has a really rich Scottish brogue. It’s such a good, rich fantasy with a lot going on. It’s about a boy named Osmo who is longing for a more adventurous life. Then he really gets it: he gets sent on a quest into the dangerous Eightpenny woods, where he meets a pangolin whose name is Never. She’s part pangolin and part girl, and is one of his companions on the journey. The other companion on his trip is named Bonk, and is a skunk-badger-wombat. He’s the one with the Scottish accent, and he’s over-the-top melodramatic and really funny, so a lot of the humour comes from that character.

It’s the most classical fantasy book of the ones we’re talking about today. It’s a really fun, interesting story. And it’s long, so if you’re looking for something nice for a longer car ride with 8-12 year olds, this is a good one.

We have come to your final pick, The Missing Diamonds. It’s the first book in the Agent Zaiba Investigates series.

I wanted to think of something that is not fantasy. A lot of the books we were talking about are fantasy, but this is a classic mystery. It’s a good one for kids who are into Nancy Drew, or for parents who grew up reading Nancy Drew and want to introduce their kids to a more modern mystery series. It’s written by Annabelle Sami, and Xenia Starr is the narrator. She does a great job bringing all the different characters to life for listeners. There are a lot of different accents that come into play, and she balances all of those well.

The series is set in the UK and this first book is set at a fancy hotel. The main character, whose name is Zaiba, is really interested in becoming a detective, and is always looking for a mystery. They’re at the hotel having a mehndi party for her cousin’s coming marriage. Another guest at the hotel, a fancy actress from America, has some diamonds stolen. So Zaiba gets on the case.

It’s a good series for a wide age range. I’d say maybe six or seven year olds could be interested in it, too. There are a lot of interesting mysteries that happen in the different books in the series: there’s a haunted house one, there’s one that’s set at a village fair where there’s a cooking contest and something gets poisoned. They’re a really good introduction to the mystery genre.

Thank you for those excellent recommendations. Have your kids ever talked about what they love about fantasy stories? 

My kids definitely are drawn to fantasy. They’ll read fantasy graphic novels and fantasy more broadly. One of the things that they’ve talked about is that there can be scary things happening in those stories, but it’s not too scary for them because they know it’s not real. That separation helps them, versus listening to contemporary fiction where there are more real life things happening.

So fantasy can let them read something that has more of an adventure to it, but it helps that it’s not so realistic. My daughter is listening to the Percy Jackson audiobooks now. She started with all the Rick Riordan Presents books, and she’s gotten really into Greek mythology. She’s also both enjoyed Medusa by Katherine Marsh, and Sparrows in the Wind by Gail Carson Levine. They’re fun stories, but you’re not going to be in the labyrinth pursued by dangerous monsters, so you can have that imaginary world separate from this world.

The whole fantasy genre is great because you can access so many different worlds.

Can you recommend something for a road trip with younger children in the car, a story for a broad age range that everybody would enjoy?

When my kids were younger, we started them out on the Paddington audiobooks. They really enjoyed the ones narrated by Hugh Bonneville and Stephen Fry, and they still listen to them sometimes when they want something nice and comforting. I really loved listening to Trombone Shorty with them, about the musician Troy Andrews who goes by the name Trombone Shorty. Dion Graham is the narrator. He’s excellent, and the audiobook has a lot of music in it. So you get to hear the trombone music and you get to hear an interesting story, too, and that’s a good balance. There was a full cast version of Charlotte’s Web a few years ago. It starts out with a pig that is about to die, so that’s a little scary, but it’s a nice audiobook and it’s good to have an audio version of such a familiar story.

Grace Lin’s Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, narrated by Janet Song, would be a good fantasy series that would appeal to younger and older readers. These books draw a lot on Chinese mythology but have their own storylines, and they are good audiobooks for a broader age range.

Another place I’d recommend looking is on AudioFile’s website. We have a list of book recommendations for kids broken down by age ranges. We update that periodically with newer titles, but that’s a good place to explore. It can be tricky on a road trip with the younger listeners, as a lot of the books are picture book adaptations and those are pretty short, so they don’t really make great books for long car rides. But if you look around you might find some that would work for different age ranges.

For older kids, publishers continue to do great adaptations of graphic novels into audiobooks. There was a funny graphic memoir this year for young adult readers called Huda F Cares? by Huda Fahmy. It’s the sequel to Huda F Are You? Those are great adaptations for teens, which could be enjoyed by listeners as young as 11 and up.

As someone who follows the genre closely, could you say what is going on with audiobooks for kids in general?

We’re continuing to see so many audiobooks get published, which is wonderful. I’ve been interested to see more full cast adaptations of graphic novels coming out. Graphic novels are such a good way for kids to get interested in reading because they’re so visual. Even if you don’t know what all the words are on the page you can figure out the story, so it’s a lot less intimidating than big blocks of text. It can be interesting to listen and read it at the same time, because you can see how they’ve had to adapt the audio experience.

Obviously, if you’re listening, you’re not necessarily seeing what’s happening on the page; the audiobooks are recorded with the expectation that you would just be listening to it. So the audiobook producers have to figure out how to let people know who’s talking, in a way that is not intrusive: letting people know what’s going on in the graphic novel with sound effects or by describing something about where it’s set.

There are factual books, too, like about how you play the Dungeons and Dragons game and other information texts. All kinds of books count as reading, and whatever kind of world you’re interested in, it’s out there for you to read and listen to.