Narrator Hillary Huber delivers a strong performance as Agatha, the young nun of the title. Agatha has lived contentedly for nine years as a religious. When her Buffalo, New York, parish goes bankrupt, Agatha and three of her sister-nuns are reassigned to a halfway house in the faded mill town of Woonsocket, Rhode Island. They find Little Neon, the Mountain Dew-colored house with its odd assortment of residents, taxing yet gratifying. With finesse and subtlety, Huber turns Luchette's short, incisive chapters into spot-on character sketches of Little Neon's residents and sisters Therese, Frances, and Mary Lucille. Listeners feel Agatha's questioning, as well as her doubts and confusion, as she draws away from the Church. Huber's warm voice and intelligent interpretation make Luchette's debut novel an appealing listen.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2021
Duration: 7 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781662089831
Publisher: Dreamscape
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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