Amanda Ronconi deftly narrates Waldman's sophomore novel, which follows a big-box store's logistics team as they work the 4:00 a.m. shift, unloading trucks and hauling merchandise to the store's floor. When the store manager announces his departure, the team's ambitious, breezily offensive leader, Meredith, seems poised to take over. Meredith is undeniably awful, but the team soon realizes her promotion could mean good things for them. Ronconi perfectly delivers Meredith's strident voice, capturing her frenzied positivity and ill-concealed contempt for her subordinates. Ronconi's voicings of the rest of the team, all of whom contend with unpredictable schedules, crushingly poor pay, and limited opportunities, are varied and sensitive. A riveting audiobook that entertains even as it illuminates the grim realities of low-wage part-time work.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2024
Duration: 9 hrs, 30 mins
Publisher: Spotify Audiobooks
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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