New Yorker Andrea Bern seems intent on absolving herself of responsibility for her own life and turning a blind eye to the misfortunes of others. Narrator Mia Barron gives her a wry and knowing voice that breaks at key moments ever so briefly into a revealing whine or falseness. Emphasizing just the right phrases from other characters and perfectly exploiting the most telling responses from Andrea, Barron capitalizes on every scene in the novel, most of which confirm that Andrea is no more tragic than anyone around her. Barron's technique creates space enough for listeners to question whether Andrea perceives life as clearly as she thinks she does. Those looking for a redemptive tale won't find it here, but they will find a narrator who can lay a character's faults bare.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2017
Duration: 5 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781501941528
Publisher: Recorded Books Inc.
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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