Small Great Things
Ruth Jefferson • Book 1
by Jodi Picoult
Narrated by Audra McDonald, Cassandra Campbell, Ari Fliakos
Why Listen to This Audiobook?
Three narrators, three worldviews — and Picoult makes you understand the white supremacist before she makes you reckon with him.
- Great if you want: a courtroom drama that forces honest racial self-examination
- Listening experience: emotionally heavy slow-burn; courtroom sequences are genuinely gripping
- Narration: McDonald as Ruth is the standout — warm, dignified, quietly devastating
- Skip if: multi-POV moral lessons start to feel didactic by hour ten
About This Audiobook
Small Great Things follows three characters around a single inciting event: an African American labor and delivery nurse named Ruth who hesitates before performing CPR on a white supremacist couple's infant, and the death that follows. Jodi Picoult builds the trial around the strategic advice of Ruth's white public defender Kennedy — who insists race should not be mentioned — and forces each character to confront the gap between intention and complicity. The novel is among the most serious attempts in commercial fiction to write directly about structural racism in America.
The three-narrator production with Audra McDonald, Cassandra Campbell, and Ari Fliakos gives each perspective its earned distinctiveness — McDonald's Ruth, Campbell's Kennedy, and Fliakos's white supremacist Turk create genuine friction through the alternating voices. The Audie Award reflects the exceptional quality of the production. At over sixteen hours the audiobook honors a novel that refuses easy resolution.