The climbing scenes can drag a bit on audio but the crux of this coming-of age story is whether heart and grit are enough.
Teens Dan and Tamma are climbing buddies and best friends. As they scale rocks in Joshua Tree National Park, they dream of making a living as “dirtbag” climbers. They rely solely on each other—no safety gear, supportive adults, or health insurance. With a low-pitched, restrained narration, Elaine Wang sets the scene in the early dawn or late evening as Dan and Tamma carefully place a foot or hand in a small dint of rock. She sharpens her tone for Tamma’s mother, who blames her daughter for her bitter disappointment in life. But Wang really lets fly each time the voluble Tamma goes on rants about the world, climbers, and her dreams.
The climbing scenes can drag a bit on audio but the crux of this coming-of age story is whether heart and grit are enough.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
Duration: 12 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9798217163496
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 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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