A culture clash between humans and aliens is brought to life in the narration of Janina Edwards and Ron Butler. On the island of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, an interconnected community of families, friends, and lovers must adjust to the sometimes violent presence of the Ynaa, an advanced race of aliens who arrive on a mysterious research mission. Edwards and Butler both excel in their smooth Caribbean accents, bringing to life an intergenerational cast of characters with distinct personalities. The voices of the alien Ynaa are hushed, with sibilant “s” sounds and quiet whispers that the listener must sometimes strain to hear and understand. As tensions rise, characters struggle to maintain relationships while learning what it means to be—or remain—human. H.C. 2020 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
Pub Date: June 18, 2019
Duration: 8 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781538584606
Publisher: Blackstone 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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