Listeners won't want to miss this surprisingly positive yet truthful novel. Teenager Eve and her father, Brady, struggle to understand why seemingly happy mother-and-wife Maddy committed suicide. Susan Bennett's soft, gentle voice is perfect for Maddy's sections, and her self-assured narration highlights the character's practicality as she questions her circumstances and tries to make things right with the family members she left behind. Thérèse Plummer's youthful pitch and varied tone, from trembly to sassy, believably project Eve's roller-coaster emotions and changing perspective on how to live a full life. Dan Bittner's performance teases out Brady's guilt, anger, and insecurities as he reviews his married life and attempts to create a new future. All three performances are strong, creating a seamless listening experience.
Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2017
Duration: 9 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781427282316
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
American colleges are favorable locales for ghastly event and hair-tearing circumstance. There is, for instance, a good deal of pleasure to be had out of professor and past-prodigy Grady Tripp's awful life, as portrayed by Michael Chabon in WONDER BOYS. There is a certain amount of slapstick here, but it's balanced by Chabon's superb portrait of a gale-force mid-life crisis, a soul-destroying albatross of an unfinished novel and the mind-numbing inconsequence of writers' conferences. David Colacci sounds a little starved for oxygen in his reading, but that's not exactly out of keeping with Grady Tripp's personal gestalt.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: N/A
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
Class lurks in varying degrees behind every great English comedy, its ineffable code being so endlessly conducive to ironic subtlety. QUEEN LUCIA, the first of the great Lucia novels of E.F. Benson, is imbued with it. Nonetheless, social striving rather than class per se gives the novel its real comic force. At its center is Lucia, the regnant, self-appointed social and cultural leader of a genteel, middle-class circle. She’s a schemer and poser of awesome theatricality and self-delusion. Although the narrative is conducted in the third person, the characters’ doings, most especially Lucia’s, are as often as not reported in the light in which the perpetrators hope to be viewed. Still, the true facts and motivations, usually base, shine luminously through. Geraldine McEwen’s reading truly enhances the work, being a model of cultivated discretion and ironic pacing.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: 9 hrs
Publisher: ISIS Audio Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
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