Polly Stone's first great choice in performing this lovely audiobook is to not attempt a Downeast accent for Christina Olsen, which would have made her humanity less universal, and which no one gets right anyway. Christina is the model for the woman in the field in Andrew Wyeth's famous painting CHRISTINA'S WORLD. In telling a story of her, Kline runs a huge risk because it's the wondering who Christina is and what she is feeling that gives the picture its power. Making her specific might have destroyed our connection to her, but, instead, amazingly, Kline paints a Christina just as evocative and memorable as Wyeth's. Stone does the best possible thing in her performance; she becomes invisible, letting this remarkably imagined Christina live and shine.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
Duration: 8 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780062466709
Publisher: Harper 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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