A trio of narrators tackles an ambitious family drama centered in America's heartland. In the late 1990s, high school senior Adam is a lauded debater with aspirations to win a national championship. Two events at this time in his life take place with far-reaching implications, causing Adam to seek out a means of understanding those events, their aftereffects, and his place in the world. Nancy Linari, Peter Berkrot, and Tristan Wright alternate the narration, portraying Adam, his mother, and his father. Both parents are therapists. The vocal inflections are top-notch, and the characters vividly brought to life, with all three narrators maintaining a sedate pace throughout. However, the difficult subject matter coupled with an unusual story structure and writing style is better suited to reading rather than listening.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
Duration: 10 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781250243225
Publisher: Macmillan 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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