At the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle, a child was given away as a raffle prize. In this thoroughly researched audiobook, Ford imagines a life for that boy as a servant in Seattle's red light district and explores his relationships with two young women--the madam's daughter, Maisie, and a Japanese kitchen maid, Fahn. Narrator Emily Woo Zeller brings Yung Kim, later renamed Ernest Young, and a cast of diverse and colorful characters to life with her expressive performance. Parallel storylines explore Ernest's youth and his life in 1962, the year of the Seattle World's Fair. Zeller subtly alters her voice so that the characters seem to age but remain unique and identifiable. A passionate performance of a romantic story.
Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
Duration: 11 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780525492573
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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