Dana Spiotta’s new novel is uneven. And in her performance of it, Elisabeth Rodgers has a strange way of humming final consonants of key words, almost to the point of adding ghost syllables after those that won’t sing. It’s distracting, but her voice is otherwise lovely, and she performs with admirable attention and skill, smoothly distinguishing the characters’ sexes, ages, and emotional states. The core of the story is a sister’s love for and frustration with her brilliant musician brother, who is gifted but solipsistic to the point of mental illness. Nik is a compelling creation, original and touching, though other parts of Denise’s life are less convincing, particularly her obsession with victims she follows on cable news channels, which seems like a padding device standing in for personality.
Pub Date: July 12, 2011
Duration: 7 hrs
Publisher: AudioGo
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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