Adjoa Andoh delivers a strong portrayal of this audiobook's main characters, Yejide and Akin, an African couple entangled in cultural traditions they hope to share with their future children. Some of the traditions, however, challenge their growing family. Andoh clearly differentiates the characters by altering her tone and adding accents to her pronunciation at various times. She virtually becomes the elder mothers and other family members who impact the couple's relationship. Andoh's tone is sharp, especially when representing Yejide. The anguish in her voice during scenes of hardship is at times purposely overbearing to convey the depth of Yejide's feelings as a mother and wife. This is a powerful novel that unfolds through Andoh's superb characterizations of the protagonists.
Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
Duration: 8 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781524781828
Publisher: Random House 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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