Narrator Alyssa Bresnahan affects a hypnotic tone, drawing the listener into a groovy, magical world in which pregnant women live without men in an expansive Victorian manor house in the woods in rural California. Their sons live there, as well. Sharon, who has changed her name to Ursa, collects "the mamas" to protect them and to allow participants to "transport" to the past. Bresnahan takes theatrical pauses and uses modulations to make the imaginary aspects of the story real and the tangible magical. Lepucki's prose adds a rich and tactile element to the narrative, which is augmented by the talented Bresnahan. As listeners slip through the "membrane" that allows for time travel, Bresnahan urges them on, creating tension that eventually pays off with unusual insights into the human condition.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
Duration: 16 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9798889567530
Publisher: Recorded Books Inc.
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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