In an unvarnished performance, JD Jackson captures the inevitable aftermath of America's buried legacy of racism and violence. Elwood Curtis was headed for college when he was sentenced to Nickel Academy, a segregated reform school. Inspired by the burgeoning Civil Rights movement, Elwood aims to defy the system and survive with his ideals intact. It's clear-eyed Turner, though, who educates him on survival as a young African-American man under jurisdiction in Florida. The intricate, compact story is comparatively light on dialogue, and Jackson's deep, gravelly voice remains steady while navigating the often harsh narrative. However, when Elwood reflects on the words of Dr. King, Jackson transforms his voice to reflect their echoing impact and the stark contrast to the reality at hand. A.S. 2020 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
Pub Date: July 16, 2019
Duration: 6 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781984891389
Publisher: Random House 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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