This queer coming-of-age novel is melancholic and reflective, and Emma Love's performance perfectly matches its tone. Just after Natalie arrives at university in Toronto, she's swept into an affair with an older woman. While adjusting to city life, navigating new friendships, and journaling for an intriguing poetry class, she finds herself falling ever more deeply into her relationship with Nora. Emma Love gives Nora a deep, assured voice and portrays Natalie's friends with lots of teenage excitement and occasional bravado. Love's performance animates Natalie's intense introspection, making the many long self-reflective passages a pleasure to listen to. The story sometimes gets bogged down in observations about art. Nevertheless, it's a poignant listen.
Pub Date: May 23, 2023
Duration: 8 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781643755090
Publisher: Hachette 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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