Narrator Jayne Entwistle's youthful voice sounds just right in her portrayal of Madame Tussaud, who started life as Anne Marie Grosholtz. Written as a memoir, or diary, the story of Tussaud's life begins when she is an orphaned child who learns about making wax casts from a Swiss doctor and continues with their sojourn in Paris, where she works with the sister of King Louis XVI to curate the waxwork museum there. Later in life, she returns to Paris after the French Revolution. Entwistle's stately reading of description paints verbal pictures, and subtle shifts in tone differentiate narrative from the sparse dialogue. Her minimally emotive reading takes the story from the luxury of the French Court to the violence of the French Revolution, and beyond.
Pub Date: 2018
Duration: 10 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780525640639
Publisher: Penguin 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
As a group of men bring their own emotional baggage to their football-obsessed reunion, R.C. Bray delivers his usual solid narration. He shifts his tones slightly but enough to put the listener in the motel with the men, revealing their foibles as the story progresses. The narrator's role in this book is a descriptive one, and Bray is a good guide. His narration becomes extra important because this is a rare instance when there almost isn't a protagonist. The author's well-written story--which alternates between serious and laugh-out-loud funny--uses quarterback Joe Theismann's 1985 injury, a broken leg, as a McGuffin.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: 5 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781681680057
Publisher: HighBridge Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
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