Németh-Parker’s narration evokes the push-pull of a mother-daughter duo in the early 2000s.
Sonia is a quick-witted single mother who keeps her cards close to her chest. When Sonia speaks, Stephanie Németh-Parker’s intonation is light and playful; when her daughter, Mila, speaks, her narration is flat and humorless. In this way, listeners will note the contrasting personalities of mother and daughter. Németh-Parker gives distinctive voices to Sonia’s early friends, family members, and parental acquaintances, layering the complex relationships in Sonia’s life. But her performance of the narrative is less varied, doing little to create tension or suspense. Still, there’s no denying the perfect storm that Mila creates when she sends an email from Sonia’s inbox in a stunt reminiscent of The Parent Trap.
Németh-Parker’s narration evokes the push-pull of a mother-daughter duo in the early 2000s.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
Duration: 8 hrs, 19 mins
DD ISBN: 9781668130575
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Review Posted Online: July 7, 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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