Narrator Kyla Garcia skillfully leads listeners through a story of space travel and distorted time. Nedda Papas is one of four astronauts on a mission to save humanity by colonizing a new planet, but their ship is going haywire. Garcia delights with distinct personalities for each member of the international crew as they struggle to reach their destination. In flashbacks to Florida in 1986, we hear 11-year-old Nedda thrilled and then devastated by the CHALLENGER launch. Garcia uses a youthful, determined voice to emphasize Nedda's curiosity, and then her growing fear as she discovers that her father's invention has triggered a catastrophe. Garcia enlivens the complex relationships between Nedda and her parents, using cool tones for her seemingly distant mother and a deeper, affectionate voice for her father.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2019
Duration: 12 hrs, 15 mins
Publisher: Audible, 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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