LaVoy’s subtle performance of this genre-defying period piece allows the gripping prose to sing.
Narrator January LaVoy opens this audiobook in the distinct, dynamic voice of Christmas Jones. The preteen ghost, an orphan who spent his short childhood in a 1930s minstrel show, delivers a fourth wall-breaking monologue that introduces a central theme: the triumphs and tragedies of Black American celebrity. LaVoy renders the rest of the audiobook in a smooth third-person narration. She distinguishes speakers through small changes in tone and pitch. An ambitious father in the 1960s seeks stardom for his three teen sons, shaping them into a pop act alongside Christmas, their ghostly adopted sibling. Despite facing devastating obstacles, the family experiences humor and satisfying personal growth, lightening the overall tone.
LaVoy’s subtle performance of this genre-defying period piece allows the gripping prose to sing.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
Duration: 17 hrs, 47 mins
DD ISBN: 9798217158898
Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio
Review Posted Online: March 17, 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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