In April 1845, in Nantucket, 24-year-old Hannah Price, member of a Quaker community, is obsessed with the night sky. She hopes to see "something new flickering among the celestial bodies." Carla Mercer-Meyer's narration captures quiet, reserved Hannah. Isaac Martin, a seaman from the Azores, becomes Hannah's student and learns how to use his ship's chronometer. But as Hannah and Isaac grow closer, Hannah's reputation is jeopardized. Mercer-Meyer misses Hannah's nervous intensity, remaining too genteel and soft-spoken. Her accent and tonal shift for Isaac are strong although her other male voices lack conviction. Amy Brill's wonderful historical fiction, inspired by Maria Mitchell, the first woman astronomer to receive the King of Denmark's prize, combines a gentle love story with a woman's sincere quest for knowledge of the heavens.
Pub Date: May 20, 2013
Duration: 14 hrs, 30 mins
Publisher: Tantor Media
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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