Listening to The Original Human Beings on audiobook, with Yareli Arizmendi as the narrator, felt less like consuming a novel and more like being personally invited to that Wallowa Lake campfire where Never Morales Santos Sundown tells her story. Her voice is soothing but firm, and that combination brought real weight to the ideas in the book. I felt like I was in the hands of someone who absolutely understood the gravity of what she was saying. The clarity of her delivery gave the whole narrative an air of authority.

The early chapters in the city dump were honestly hard for me to get through. The children live and scavenge in a toxic landfill, dodging soldiers, cops, and cartel thugs who treat them as expendable. Never’s mother is trapped in a horrifying relationship with General Mendosa and his bodyguard Gómez, and the violence they bring into the dump is unflinching. But the book refuses to collapse into misery. It keeps interrupting the horror with wild, irreverent humor: Mama staging mock-death dramas, kids playing pranks on authorities, and Loco Lucy, the aristocrat turned “vampiro” in a torn ball gown, reigning over the garbage like some broken fairy-tale queen. That mix of grief and laughter gave me whiplash, yet it felt emotionally true to how people actually survive trauma.

As Never’s world widens, the book shifts gears into something more reflective and overtly philosophical. We follow her escape from Honduras into the orbit of the Nez Percé, whose stories of being “The Walking-Out People” and “Original Human Beings” give her a new lens for understanding both her own life and the wider human story. The anthropology and Indigenous-knowledge sections could have turned into lectures, but because they’re filtered through Never’s battered, stubbornly curious voice, they feel more like late-night conversations with an elder than like theory. I loved how the narrative insists that humans, animals, and land form one kinship network, and how that idea quietly expands what “neighbor” means.

The final third, with Never as an aging anthropologist and cellist, took the book to a place I didn’t expect. Her Carnegie Hall performance could have read as a neat inspirational payoff, but it’s written more like a communal exorcism than a triumphalist finale. When she begins to dance with her cello, channeling the children of the dump, the migrants on the trains, and the songs of the Nimiipuu, the scene slips into a kind of musical magical realism. By the end I felt that click you get when a long, winding narrative suddenly makes sense of itself.

This is not a gentle read: it’s full of abuse, cartel violence, and spiritual harm. But having Yareli Arizmendi as the narrator made a big difference in how I could receive it. Her voice softened some of the edges without ever diluting the message; it held the space so the story’s mix of grief, joy, and defiant love could land fully. For me, the intensity was worth it. The story never lets go of joy as resistance, or of love as a kind of evolutionary leap humanity still has to make.

Listening Length: 13 hours and 43 minutes