Laser's performance paints an evocative picture of a funny and flawed woman facing professional and personal crossroads.
Screenwriter Caroline lives in Los Angeles with her psychotherapist husband, Harry. Her work in the industry has been tenuous of late, and she has been spending her days working on projects alone with a critical voice in her head. Narrator Helen Laser does a great job of characterizing the funny yet insecure Caroline. Caroline’s neurotic inner voice can be deadpan, disdainful, and self-critical, and she maintains a sardonic sense of humor as she frets about work security, her ambivalent feelings about having children, and her fixation on one of her husband's therapy patients, whom she secretly befriends. Laser’s male characters tend to sound similar.
Laser's performance paints an evocative picture of a funny and flawed woman facing professional and personal crossroads.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
Duration: 9 hrs, 8 mins
DD ISBN: 9781668128732
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: yesterday
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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