Listeners may want to forget about the plot of this book and just enjoy the fine writing and performance. This short novel about a 1929 Missouri dance hall explosion that killed 42 people is a series of brief vignettes and is difficult to follow on audio. The writing is beautiful, however, and narrator Brian Troxell's interpretation, touched by a bit of an accent, is outstanding. His rendition of Alma, a maid townsfolk consider crazy who understands much about the explosion, is outstanding. Her pinched voice fits her curmudgeonly personality. Troxell renders other characters cleanly, and the plot does come together in the end. Troxell and author Daniel Woodrell keep listeners interested, if not fully comprehending, until then.
Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
Duration: 4 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9781478924579
Publisher: Hachette 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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