Narrator Susan Bennett employs a light Mountain accent to reflect the Pennsylvania Appalachian locale of this dark fairy tale. Her character voices, especially those of its featured characters, flourish into even stronger accents that ground them more squarely in the holler. Part coming-of-age in the 1980s, part magical realism, and part horror, the story follows impoverished sisters Sheila and Angie as they endure the hunt for the killer of two female hikers and ostracism from their peers. Bennett projects the emotional turmoil of Sheila, the older sister, in a higher, more strident tone, while younger, war-obsessed Angie has a belligerent tone. Unsettling and engrossing, this exploration of regional isolation will resonate with the listener long after the audiobook ends.
Pub Date: July 16, 2024
Duration: 8 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9798892737630
Publisher: Recorded Books Inc.
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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