Narrator Ines del Castillo sounds very much like the teenage heroine, Ines, who has been accepted to exclusive Catherine House, a college that boasts a host of successful graduates. After a rigorous application process, accepted students must agree to three years of absolute isolation, having no contact with their families or the outside world. In exchange, everything they need, including tuition, is provided. Del Castillo is spot-on delivering Ines's feelings of uncertainty and her reluctance to conform, both of which enhance Catherine House's ominous atmosphere. Students are subjected to mass hypnosis, plasm experimentation, and brainwashing. Surreal out-of-body experiences make this more science fiction than gothic horror, but del Castillo does her best to engage the listener in this overly long, overplotted, and ultimately unsatisfying debut novel.
Pub Date: May 12, 2020
Duration: 11 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780063005181
Publisher: Harper 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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