Narrator Marin Ireland has a gift for mimicry. She invests each character with a tone, inflection, and pace that establish their identity. Her Valley girls sound vapid and her stoners stoned, but each has slightly different gradations. Hollywood power types, the essence of corruption, are voiced expertly as greedy and affectless. In the darkening landscape of this dystopian novel, California has reached its end. Environmental collapse arrives in the form of man-made water--called Wat-R--which causes random-onset dementia. The plot is divided between California, where a novelist goes to work on the movie version of his book, and upstate New York, where his wife, an environmental activist, and precocious daughter join an end-of-nature commune. The writing is richly detailed and the story vividly imagined. The narration sings.
Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
Duration: 11 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593410554
Publisher: Random House 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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