Hope Davis is an outstanding narrator, and many will enjoy her interpretation of Ann Patchett's expansive new novel, based on her own life. An affair followed by divorce divides two families, and the repercussions stretch over several decades, linking the two sets of children in a common tragedy. The novel rests heavily on narration, and on different character perspectives--a strategy wonderfully conceived and executed by Patchett, who depicts key events in retrospect and at a distance, in chapters assigned to different decades, different sets of characters, and different sides of the country. Dialogue scenes are essential, as well, and here Davis might have done better to maintain a consistent narrative voice, rather than trying to represent individual character voices, which prove of uneven quality. Regardless, Patchett is, as always, a surprising and resourceful storyteller.
Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
Duration: 10 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780062561718
Publisher: Harper 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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