Narrator Judith Ivey's Minnesota accent gives authenticity to this delightful audiobook about two estranged sisters. Strong-willed Helen was so determined to own a brewery that she convinced her father to make her his sole heir. As Helen's beer becomes a regional favorite, Edith struggles to raise her children, take care of her ailing husband, and raise her orphaned granddaughter, never once spending her hard-earned money on her sister's lager. Ivey's performance beautifully underscores the women's unique personalities as each finds her way through grief and betrayals, ambition and hope. Ivey wisely puts the charm of this story in the spotlight, delivering a tone of Midwestern pragmatism as the women bake pies, brew beer, nurture unlikely friendships, and find redemption.
Pub Date: July 23, 2019
Duration: 11 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9781524777685
Publisher: Penguin 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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