Heather Wilds's lovely, lyrical narration of this audiobook makes for a memorable experience, especially when combined with an unconventional story like this one. In this novel, Julia Pastrana is a featured performer in carnivals. Labeled a "freak," Julia makes her way in the world by simultaneously perplexing and enchanting audiences with the unlikely combination of her unusual appearance and her substantial musical talents. Wilds's clear and sophisticated tone offers an elegance and a gentleness that make Julia especially sympathetic to the listener. The age-old idea that humans reveal their lack of humanity when faced with someone different is omnipresent here. There are slow moments and occasional pronunciations and accents that seem a bit off, but ultimately Wilds is successful.
Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2016
Duration: 12 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781681682594
Publisher: HighBridge 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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