The youthful-sounding Sarah Bierstock is an excellent choice to narrate this coming-of-age novel. Isabel is in the last semester of her senior year of college, but life seems as confusing as ever. Bierstock makes Isabel's endless ruminations and dilemmas relatable, ensuring that she is a sympathetic character. Listeners will lean in to the specifics of this young Jewish woman who is grappling with quintessential 20-something questions. She does so in the late 1990s, during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Bierstock creates a likable character in Isabel, and listeners will want her to find her path--even if takes an affair with a professor to eliminate the bad options. Listeners may want to be aware that this title includes depictions of sexual violence.
Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2023
Duration: 7 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781250882387
Publisher: Macmillan 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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