Narrator Prentice Onayemi invigorates the listener with a steady pace and musical intonation as two families come together in Manhattan—one at the peak of socioeconomic success and one at the bottom. Onayemi’s distinctive accents ensure that the listener can differentiate between the the African immigrants and the American characters featured in this story of the American Dream. Things go well for both families at first, but then, as one mother hires the other to help out in her home, difficulties develop that will affect everyone. Onayemi is especially touching in his portrayal of Neni, the Cameroonian mother and wife; he even sings a few lines of her African dialect. Most important, he makes the two different cultural worlds depicted in the novel vivid and fully believable. As Onayemi takes us on the emotional journeys of the characters, it’s a delightful and at times discomforting experience—but well worth the listen.
Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2016
Duration: 12 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9780147523105
Publisher: Random House 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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