Narrator Shayna Small’s affecting performance brings listeners into the complex world of African-American identical twins. As teens in the postwar years in Louisiana, they run away from home, choosing two very different paths. Stella, taking advantage of a white businessman’s attentions, opts to pass as white, erasing all connections to her birth family. Desiree, however, marries the Blackest man she can, eventually returning home to live with her mother. Small’s soft voice and measured delivery allow listeners the space to absorb the many consequences of the twins’ choices, including Stella’s constant fear of discovery, Desiree’s burdens of responsibility, and their trickle-down effects on their own daughters. This audiobook about the search for self-identity as underscored by race, socioeconomics, and family will prompt timely conversation. C.B.L. 2020 Best Audiobook © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
Pub Date: June 2, 2020
Duration: 11 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780525637141
Publisher: Penguin 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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