In the weeks leading up to the Middlestein twins' b'nai mitzvah, three generations of the family recall the past, trying to understand the demise of Edie and Richard's 40-year marriage. Masterfully manipulating inflection and tempo, actress Molly Ringwald realistically channels the inner dialogue of the family members. For example, she keeps pace as Edie's thoughts jump from nostalgia over her courtship to anger when she remembers the day Richard left her. Thanks to Ringwald's understated characterizations, listeners can differentiate among characters and develop their own reactions as the individual personalities of the Middlesteins are revealed. Ringwald's Midwest accent, tinged with a hint of Yiddish for the older generation, helps set the scene for this introspective look at the life of a family.
Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2012
Duration: 7 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781611136203
Publisher: Hachette 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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