Playing with layered meanings of shelter, author, and, here, narrator, Barbara Kingsolver weaves the stories of two families tied to the same house in Vineland, New Jersey, across two centuries. In the present day, Willa copes with the aftermath of the unexpected loss of her daughter-in-law, adding additional burden to a family barely getting by. In the late nineteenth century, Thatcher returns to his wife's ancestral homeland for a teaching position. Each family struggles to rise above the economic and psychological barriers of its time. The parallels are striking, often dispiriting. Marred at the outset by a background echo, Kingsolver's performance is imperfect and uneven, though still worthwhile. Her warm, lightly accented voice with its natural emotional pull is effectively applied in her performances of the female characters.
Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
Duration: 16 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780062865502
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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