Katharine McEwan gives a first-rate performance as Maria “Minnie” Feodorovna, the Danish princess who became czarina of Russia, and mother of Nicholas, the last Romanov czar. McEwan is utterly believable as the young woman leaving home, expecting to marry the czarevich, heir to the Russian throne. McEwan fully becomes Minnie as she shares her dreams and disappointments, her surprisingly loving marriage, and her joys in motherhood. With wry tones McEwan shows the older Minnie’s manipulations, making almost palpable her instinctive distrust of Alexandra, Nicholas’s chosen bride. McEwan transports us from the nobility’s overindulgent palaces to the people’s soul-sucking poverty to the inevitable revolution, all told through the eyes of the Romanov empress. Gortner’s impeccable research and McEwan’s spot-on narration make for entertaining and informative listening.
Pub Date: July 10, 2018
Duration: 17 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780525593645
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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