As a half-Chinese teenager in Shanghai, Alva shared a close bond with her American expat mother but longed for the idealized California life depicted in movies. Jennifer Lim's portrayal of Alva's youthful resentment is colored with both confusion and defiance. Who is her father, and why must they live this half-in/half-out life in China? When Alva's mom marries a much older Chinese businessman, Alva rebels. David Shih's more mature voice tells the story of Lu Fang, Alva's unlikely new stepfather. Shih leads the listener back in time to gradually reveal Lu Fang's past as a victim of Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution, and then his unlikely history with Alva's mother. The performance is enhanced by both narrators' delivery of Mandarin names and phrases.
Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2024
Duration: 11 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780063257887
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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