As three of the teenaged Richardson children watch their suburban Ohio home being engulfed in flames, they must consider whether the absence of their rebellious sister is significant. With a youthful voice, Jennifer Lim depicts Izzie's angst and awakening joy in the months preceding the fire, when she discovers friendship with newcomer Pearl and her artistic single mother. Lim voices the contrasting mothers skillfully: We hear the carefully contained control-freak shrewishness of Izzie's mom in contrast with the introspective playfulness of Pearl's mother. Lim employs a soft Asian accent for the heartbroken young Chinese mother who regrets having given up her baby for adoption. The narrative's foreshadowing does not reveal all the mysteries, and Lim lends a shade of innocence that stays true to the secrets.
Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
Duration: 11 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780525498070
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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