Claire Jiménez narrates her hilarious yet heartrending debut, giving voice to a Puerto Rican family that is still reeling from the shock of having lost their 13-year-old daughter, Ruthy, 12 years earlier. Oldest daughter Jessica, youngest daughter Nina, and mom Dolores reckon with Ruthy's disappearance in different ways--with frustration, exhaustion, incomprehension, and hurt. Memories of the past come to light when it seems that an older, world-weary Ruthy may have surfaced in an unexpected place. With a propulsive, rhythmic delivery, Jiménez brings out the energy of this wounded family, creating a vibrant listening experience. While some may wish for stronger aural cues to distinguish the family members' perspectives, Jiménez's warm delivery will sweep listeners up and have them hoping for Ruthy's eventual return.
Pub Date: March 7, 2023
Duration: 6 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781668620984
Publisher: Hachette 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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