Ann Marie Gideon narrates this story of long-buried family secrets coming to light through a series of clues in a scavenger hunt. When Miranda's long-estranged Uncle Billy leaves her Prospero Bookshop in his will, she returns to California, embarking on a journey to uncover the reason for her uncle's estrangement. Gideon gives Miranda, the story's first-person narrator, a believable voice--impatient sounding with her mother as she tries to get her to explain the estrangement and friendly with new connections opened by the hunt. Voices for the other characters are made unique through tempo and tone. Susie, the mother, also has impatience in her voice, an emotion that complicates Miranda's search for answers. Although the family secret is pretty obvious early on, the hunt, with its many literary references, is entertaining.
Pub Date: June 12, 2018
Duration: 11 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781488204753
Publisher: Harlequin 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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