Brittany Pressley's skillful narration of this contemplative novel about adolescent yearning invites listeners to consider the limits of their own understanding. Seeking her absent father, Olivia turns up at his last known address: a Buddhist retreat center. Though she finds no trace of him there, she does find apparent friendship in the form of three magnetic girls who are hoping to master the practice of levitation. Pressley's simultaneously world-weary yet vulnerable performance captures Olivia's desperation to believe in something real. Pressley also creates a distinct array of voices for each of Olivia's new friends, especially the ethereal and frighteningly compelling Serena. As the girls draw closer to discovering what they believe is the key to enlightenment, listeners will be eager to know what they find.
Pub Date: June 16, 2020
Duration: 9 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780063015609
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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