Brittany Pressley's sweet voice, with its hint of vocal fry, is the ideal vehicle for this transporting novel of hardship, love, and redemption. Listeners meet teenage Cindra Zoeller in the 1990s, when she is sent to a Montana reform camp. Soon, she and the camp's young handyman, Lucky Turtle, have fallen in love. They begin an unforgettable lifelong odyssey by escaping into the Montana wilderness. For more than that, you must listen. Pressley captures Cindra's mix of skepticism and naïveté, and shapes a considered tone for Lucky, reflecting his thoughtful personality. Native Crow characters are honored with realistic speech patterns. Action sequences are staccato. And the novel's bounteous lyricism, and its love for landscape and people, are delivered with heart-brimming appreciation.
Pub Date: April 26, 2022
Duration: 14 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781649041043
Publisher: Workman 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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