Narrator Joy Osmanski delivers the coming-of-age story of two girls who are separated by 70 years yet linked by world-changing events. Osmanski's spirited tone gives life to the anxieties and hopes of 12-year-olds Hannah and Anna, who are both burdened by loneliness and distant parents. In 1939 Berlin, Hannah plots escape from the "ogres" and faces uncertainty on a ship to Cuba. In 2014 New York City, Anna feels friendless except for her photograph of her father, who disappeared on September 11, 2001. Osmanski's character voices keep the girls center stage, while Hannah's friend Leo and the girls' parents remain less prominent characters. Even the elderly Hannah has a livelier voice than Anna's mother when they meet in Cuba. The story is winding and uneven, but hope and wonder shine brightly in these girls.
Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
Duration: 10 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781508226840
Publisher: Simon & Schuster 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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