Distinct voices mirror distinct inner worlds.
This intimate drama spans decades and continents, following three generations of a family between Thailand and the U.S. Among the five main characters, only matriarch Gimjaa and her eldest daughter, Manda, share a narrator, Cindy Kay, a choice that shows their similarities even as they butt heads and take divergent life paths. As an adolescent, Manda has emotional range, swinging from jealousy to fear to dreaminess; as an adult, she almost whispers, secretive and careful even within her own mind. Sura Siu’s voice for her sister, Siripon, is bright, carefully cheerful, and calm, with a smothered edge of anxiety. Performed by Pun Bandhu, Siripon’s husband, Kamron, is a survivor of a difficult childhood and youth, and he sounds deep-voiced and weary even as a young man. Their American-born son, Ben, performed by Roy Vongtama, sounds Californian, slightly out of place in his family in both identity and voice.
Distinct voices mirror distinct inner worlds.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
Duration: 9 hrs, 58 mins
DD ISBN: 9798217176526
Publisher: Random House Audio
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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