Satire isn't easy to write or to perform. Both the author and the narrator succeed notably in this funny, trenchant debut novel. William DeMeritt uses all his acting skills plus a strong narrative delivery to portray the wide cast of characters who live in this audiobook. He convincingly inhabits the hyperactive mind of Anders, a 15-year-old Tom Sawyer-like youth with a talent for twirling a flag and spinning a story. Anders twirls his Civil War flags for the Union, then the Confederacy, then the Union again in a Black regiment. The novel uses the period to reflect upon the present. DeMeritt does extraordinary work mimicking Southern and Northern generals, a Haitian, New Yorkers, and many more. An outstanding listening experience.
Pub Date: June 17, 2025
Duration: 9 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9781250401977
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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